


For the Light Before and After

by camierrant



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, An Attempt At Slow Burn, Angst with a Happy Ending, Bisexual Katsuki Yuuri, Depression, Drunkenness, Eventual Smut, F/F, Fluff and Angst, Gender or Sex Swap, Genderbending, I guess "canon flexible" is a more appropriate term, I'll fix the tags when necessary, Many of the side characters remain as they are in the show, Masturbation, Nonbinary Character, POV Katsuki Yuuri, Rule 63, Trans Character, Viktor with a "K", Yuuri and Viktoria are weird moms
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-24
Updated: 2017-07-03
Packaged: 2018-11-18 05:49:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 24,963
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11284968
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/camierrant/pseuds/camierrant
Summary: And really, Yuuri could have gone her whole life without ever competing. She could have become a skating instructor, stayed in Hasetsu, married some nondescript, supportive businessman, had a couple of kids, settled down, raised them, and died. As long as she had skating at all, she could have been content—that, Yuuri firmly believed. But content was not the same as happy.Then Viktoria crashed into the Junior Division, and crashed into eight-year-old Yuuri’s life like the meteor that hit the earth so hard that it created the moon. And, “And the rest was history,” didn’t apply, because this wasn’t over yet. No one had ever affected Yuuri like Viktoria did, in a way she still hadn’t learned to articulate. But she didn’t need to. Not yet. Someday she would have her chance.Yuri!!! on Ice transposed into the world of Ladies' figure skating, following some beats of the show, embellishing some, changing others. A sappy, hopefully sexy retelling of YoI with a focus on the relationship between Yuuri and Viktoria and a character study of Yuuri Katsuki.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The title comes from the song "Beth/Rest" by Bon Iver because it's about marriage and I'm a sap. 
> 
> This is a cisswap/genderbend fic. I know that content in this vein is divisive: some people like it, others hate it. Please let me know if there is anything I can tag this for the benefit of those who do not wish to read it. The last thing I want is for someone to be discomforted or experience dysphoria because of this work. Also, it is not a strict cisswap, there are trans characters. Any recommendations regarding the presentation of trans characters (including any necessary corrections to vocabulary or recommended further readings) would be highly appreciated. 
> 
> Regarding my reasoning for writing the story this way: I like Yuri!!! on Ice. I love the story. I don’t love it as a show. I’d like to cite [Mother’s Basement’s video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0G-UqIbfDI) regarding some of the issues he had with it, which I share. I want to do a comprehensive, canon-flexible rewrite of the show in a medium where it could be slower-paced. And, while I also like a lot of the side characters, I want to whole-ass the romance a little more. And the show opened a discussion on gender roles that it didn’t have time to flesh out. I want the change in gender to have a significant impact on the story. That being said, as a cis woman, I do not feel qualified to write trans narratives without being able to consult trans people. I interviewed the trans group in the LGBTQ+ community at my school and I have nonbinary people close to me who have been very gracious in discussing the presentation of trans characters with me, as well as reading over some sections of the work and offering criticism and revision strategies. Basically what this all amounts to is this: I would rather write a well-done cisswap story than a poorly-done trans characters story. (you can read a twitter thread that expounds on this really well [here](https://twitter.com/MihaelKai/status/867727870365454336))
> 
> With regards to pacing, the first few chapters may seem like carbon copies of the anime, but that's because the first few episodes of the anime have pretty good pacing. Things will slow down, I promise. Also, I speak neither Italian nor Russian, so the Stammi Vicino lyrics have not been changed, and the Russian last names have not been changed to agree with gender. I did come up with a hackneyed justification for Viktoria's last name still being Nikiforov, which will come in later.
> 
> So that’s that. This is a too-long introduction, but it does console me to provide a bit of context. My nerves are extremely high, so if I don’t respond to all comments please do not take offense. I'm not sure what my update schedule will be exactly, but let it be known that I already have a lot of this written (like 50k words smh), but some details (like the ending (canon-flexible, remember?)) are still in the works. I promise that future author’s notes sections will not be so serious or long. To everyone who reads I am indebted. Thank you very, very much.

_I knew you fine, sight dream of mine_  
_But I know my eyes, they've often lied_  
_And I move like blood, like fire and flood_  
_Despite you_

Fleet Foxes, "Fool's Errand"  
 

It was the solitary girl she fell in love with first. The figure became familiar to Yuuri Katuski over fifteen years, but with a sentience that seemed beyond a silhouette, that seemed to know Yuuri deeply, inherently. In her uninterrupted dance, brimming with vitality and purpose. The scrape of her skates against soft, white ice, the hair that cascaded further and further down until it was in a severed pile.

In a contained body, Yuuri had never seen such majesty. And every morning Yuuri would wake and lace up her skates and try to dance in her image, in her reverent shadow. And with a gesture that was in every good dream, the girl, the woman, reached out a graceful arm to Yuuri, beckoning her like a green light, not _go_ , but _come_. 

 

* * *

 

This was not a good dream. Ideally, it was a nightmare, and Yuuri would wake up and once again be fifteen and motivated and blossoming under encouragement rather than shrinking.

Whatever she performed, she left on the rink. That made things easier. A performance, one and done. Yuuri had left her hope on the ice. She’d known the results before settling in at the kiss and cry (which didn’t stop her from crying, but semantics). Celestino patted her shoulder and did his best to make her feel less like a failure, but it was a little early for that.

Her ass hurt (from falling). Her head hurt (from self-inflicted dehydration). Her heart hurt (from everything else), which was a metaphor she resented, usually, but every few seconds, self-awareness would tug at the tendons of her breast like puppet strings, suspending her over reality. And she could look down and count every failure, every crisis, every loss from this three-day fall back into it with that profound ache louder and louder, ringing in her ears.

Yuuri could count on one hand days she would let herself qualify as objectively horrible. Usually there was a saving grace, but she was too weak to find it this time. And that was fine. Every chair became a kiss and cry. She gave herself that.

 

The Grand Prix Final had been held in Sochi, Russia this year. Ladies’ skating saw intense, diverse competition, and with the rising popularity in ladies’ skating thanks to a certain record-breaking skater, the pressure was on now more than ever. It was something of a feminist revolution, in its own private way, a women’s sport ascending to the same level of popularity and expectation as the men’s counterpart. Scores were higher, jump combinations more difficult, the first ever quadruple salchow had been landed in the ladies’ senior division a few years prior and once in a blue moon someone pulled it off again and everyone lost their minds.

Those on the podium were not especially surprising, it was only a matter of where two of them landed. In third place was the eighteen (going on nineteen) Jeanne-Jacqueline Leroy from Canada, who radiated personality and swagger. She had visible tattoos, something the judges had a horrible time getting over, but despite her brashness and youth she had fought her way to the top three against expectations.

In second was Christine Giacometti, a swiss woman of almost twenty-five. She had legs for days and gorgeous spins and incorporated into every performance a demure yet mature sexuality that was hard to ignore, to say the least. In the span of her career, she had won silver more times than most skaters ever won a medal at all, and had never suffered an injury too debilitating.

Yuuri was in sixth. Above her were Chinese and Italian skaters she had hardly spoken with. Their programs had been excellent, of course. They deserved to beat her by a mile. It was no matter, though. There was only one woman Yuuri had cared about at this competition.

Even those who didn’t know a blasted thing about figure skating knew of the name, or just the image. With a technically infallible career spanning fifteen years, from her junior debut to her senior world conquest, her name was laced with gold and serenity and unbelievability. She was a paragon of hard work, dedication, and natural ability, one of the shining stars of the Russian stronghold of world-class skaters, of all age and gender. And on the ice, smiling in a shower of roses, every inch of her glimmering under the blue lights, there was something about her that was so otherworldly that it still took Yuuri’s breath away after all these years.

She broke the world record again, it should be noted, Viktoria Nikiforov. Age twenty-seven, one of the oldest competing, most decorated, and successful skaters in history. Yuuri always thought she had to be an alien to have a body so strong, so perfect, but the expressiveness, the human emotion conveyed in every routine seemed to undermine that completely. She had the smile of the goddess of wisdom, the form of the goddess of beauty, and the drama of the goddess of death. Yuuri knew her like the back of her hand.

 

_Trending on #WorldFigure—_

_-Viktoria Nikiforov, age 27, wins fifth consecutive Grand Prix Gold Medal, breaks world record_

_-Junior World Champion Yuri Plisetsky wipes the floor with Junior Grand Prix_

_-What can’t she do? A comprehensive review of Viktoria Nikiforov’s unparalleled legacy_

_-Nikiforov, unchallenged, soars over competition to win Grand Prix_

_-Nikiforov and Plisetsky—Entering a Renaissance of Russian Figure Skating_

_-Weight gain worries? Yuuri Katsuki pigs out at restaurant before Grand Prix Final_

_-Welcome to Leroy, Goodbye to Katsuki? Behind tonight’s surprising (and not surprising) GPF rankings_

_-Yuuri Katsuki plummets one-hundred points behind Viktoria Nikiforov. Is this the end of an era for Japanese skating?_

Yuuri selected the article and read:

_Yuuri Katsuki, as the sole representative of Japan in this year’s Grand Prix series, went in with high hopes and high expectations. At twenty-three, she’s certainly not young for a figure skater. Has this ice princess passed her peak? Could retirement be on the horizon?_

“Stop reading the news, Yuuri, please!”

Yuuri clipped back into reality. She’d been reading aloud, albeit quietly, and her coach was looming protectively over her shoulder.

Where was she again? She was sitting in some metal folding chair in some hallway in some wing of the building. Her eyes had gone in and out of phases of stinging, but she’d been too distracted to notice if she had ever started crying.

She got up. “Sorry,” she said in a failed attempt at sounding put together. “I’m gonna run to the bathroom, I feel a little nauseous.” Given her habit of overeating, Coach had no reason to suspect her of anything otherwise.

Celestino folded his arms and leaned back against the wall. “Don’t stay away too long,” he said. And in lieu of, “you shouldn’t be alone when you’re emotionally vulnerable,” he continued: “you wouldn’t want to miss the awards ceremony.”

Yuuri nodded and walked off slowly, feet dragging under her like they had cinderblocks strapped to them, her hair up in a bun so tight it was giving her a migraine. Her glasses had gotten fogged up and dirty at some point so the floor looked like it was crawling with bacteria. Reporters buzzed by her here and there on her way to the restroom, but they paid her little mind. She wasn’t who they cared about tonight if they knew any better.

She closed out of the article. The home screen of her phone was a photo of her puppy back home, back in Japan. Only he wasn’t a puppy anymore. He must have had little gray and white hairs around his muzzle, giving him grizzly old man eyebrows, but he was still soft and fluffy and sweet like always. Still so loving and kind. And he was attentive, and had always loved Yuuri. _Vicchan_.

Ah, she was doing it again. She was thinking of him as a constant, when he was a finite thing, with a beginning, middle, and end, just a few days ago.

Yuuri was glad the restroom signs had the silly, gendered stick people drawn outside the doors, otherwise who knows where she would have ended up. Her knowledge of Russian was next to none, something she had attempted to remedy before coming to Sochi, but between school and training, it hadn’t panned out, even with her room and rink mate Phichit flashing note cards with basic vocabulary words at her between run-throughs.

“Dog! Bathroom! Mother! Sister! Bakery!”

“Why do I need to know how to say bakery?” Yuuri had asked. “I’ll be there for skating.”

Phichit had just shrugged. “Anything might come in handy.”

Yuuri wished she’d learned how to say, “put me in an oven so I can fucking burn to death away from cloying eyes.” A bathroom stall would do.

She sat on the toilet, which became kiss and cry number three of the night, where she settled in to stare at pictures of Vicchan as a puppy to distract her from her loss. She kept her phone on because she couldn’t bear to see the lock screen photo. Would the eyes be sympathetic, now? Understanding? She had a poodle, too, after all. Yuuri wanted to think she would understand, that she wouldn’t be disappointed.

The phone started ringing in her hand, and the photo of her smiling mother appeared. Accept? Decline?

Might as well get it out of the way.

“Hello?” she said. Her mother said hi and congratulations. Yuuri said she hoped they hadn’t been too disappointed in her loss.

“No, not at all,” said her mother. “We’re proud of you no matter what. Look at how far you’ve come! Everyone was so excited to watch you!”

“Everyone?”

“We had a little viewing party,” said her mother.

Yuuri went cold. Distantly, she heard the bathroom door open, but paid it no mind. “A viewing party? How many people were there?”

Her mother continued, unaffected. “Well, ten or fifteen. A lot of family, of course, the Nishigoris and Minako, and—”

“Mom!” Yuuri cried, laughing on the tail end. “You’ve gotta be kidding! That’s so embarrassing!” Her laughter disintegrated and spiraled downward back into sobs as tears welled in the corner of her eyes. _Again_ , why was she so unsteady? Some days she felt there wasn’t a real bone in her body. “I’m sorry,” she choked out. “I really messed up. I hope I can make it up to you.”

And she hung up.

And she cried, harder now than she had allowed herself before. Because she was alone, truly, with only her thoughts, running wild like children in a hedge maze, and the realities settling in deeper and deeper, sinking into concrete and becoming permanent.

Vicchan dead. Last place. Had she even seen it? Was Yuuri even competition?

 _Viktoria_ …

 

_CLANG!_

Yuuri screamed and jumped to her feet, wiping the tears off her face. It sounded like a rhinoceros had charged head-first into the stall door, which didn’t make much sense, considering every other stall was available.

She unlocked the door and pushed it open slowly, muttering a self-effacing apology, when she saw standing before her a child almost ten years her junior, with shiny yellow hair and flat blueish eyes, stabbing into Yuuri with some ghostly facet that made her hair stand on end.

Yuri Plisetsky was something of a troublemaker at her home rink in Russia, often dubbed a punk, and infamous for disobeying her coach at literally every opportunity. Yuuri was probably five inches taller than her, but felt like a stag beetle under ready to be crushed by Yuri’s tacky, leopard-print sneakers.

Any other day it would have been hilarious. The way Yuri said, “Hey,” with a forced growl to her voice was so comical Yuuri wondered again if this was all some fucked-up dream.

But it continued, and it was not funny, because Yuuri Katsuki, an adult woman who could drink and drive a car and had a passport and had almost graduated college, was being held-up in a bathroom by a tiny Russian figure skater who could surpass her in a second. It was not funny.

“H-huh?”

“I said, ‘hey!’” she snapped. She didn’t wait for a counter this time. “I’ll be in the senior division next season, so you better shape up or get out.”

“I’m sorry?”

Yuri bared her teeth. “We don’t need two Yuris in the same competition, and no one would miss you if you retired.” She took half a step back, and Yuuri wondered if she really was going to reel back and slug Yuuri across the cheek. But she grabbed the collar of Yuuri’s national jacket and pulled her downward with incredible force to scream in her face, “So get the hell out of Russia, _loser_!”

Then Yuri released her collar, shot her one last defiant glower, and stalked out of the bathroom.

Yuuri straightened and turned toward the exit, only to be assaulted by her own reflection. Gaunt in some places pudgy in others. A dime a dozen ice princess. She let her hair down and glared at it. Loose and wild, it gave her a maddened look, like some heartbroken women, some Giselle. What a headache. Viktoria Nikiforov didn’t get headaches like that anymore. She wasn’t a bunhead.

It was reassuring, in an odd way, to hear Yuri Plisetsky say that. At least someone agreed with her.

_Loser._

 

The awards ceremony was gorgeous. All three women brandished their country’s flag and wore flower crowns. Yuuri thought back to when Viktoria had just debuted in the senior division, how she had silver hair past her waist and wore a blue flower crown that made her eyes visible like neon signs from miles away. She was a paragon of achievement and of love of the art.

Yuuri had always marveled at how Viktoria seemed to have the world of skating wrapped around her finger, but what made it most amazing was it wasn’t undeserved attention. Other than being Russian, she had some cards stacked against her: age, height, body type, even hairstyle. Everything mattered. Viktoria was twenty-seven, five-foot-six, made of almost nothing but muscle, which gave her evident curves, and had hair too short to tie back. Every convention was defied, every category deconstructed. She was a monster of her own creation, and there would never be anyone like her.

As a competitor, that settled over Yuuri’s aspirations like a thick layer of snow. No one would ever be like Viktoria Nikiforov, and then could anyone compete with her? Yuuri’s admiration and awe weren’t enough to dissuade her—it would happen, surely. She would face Viktoria on the ice as a competitor. That had been the plan.

She smiled at Yuuri from her lock screen. She’d been smiling at Yuuri for fifteen years, it seemed. Every time she stepped onto the ice, Viktoria was there. Like the final boss, like the protective blanket. Next, she would smile at Yuuri from below her on the podium.

That had been the plan.

Where was that young, live Viktoria now? Yuuri wondered, watching her stand arm in arm with her worthy juniors, in her lovely pink suit jacket and flowing skirt. It had been years since she’d worn a skirt. Was this some return to form? An attempt to recapture the innocence of her early career? Did it do something different for this routine? It was a work entitled _Stammi Vicino_ , maybe the skirt was her channeling the more feminine side evoked by the operatic soprano. She was incredible of course, but Yuuri had thought this was her blue period.

Or Yuuri was reading too much into it, but it made the losses a little more bearable if she didn’t think about them. Speculating the details of Viktoria’s career was a bit of a hobby (formerly an obsession) for Yuuri. She used to have an alert on her phone whenever Viktoria was in the news (she remembered dropping her phone on the bus when a headline had announced, _Nikiforov ruins marriage!—figure skater found to be mistress in illustrious affair,_ when in reality she had just danced with the husband once at a benefit gala). She remembered the way her heart stopped when Viktoria first appeared on the ice with her hair chopped off. She looked practically regal, untouchable, a projection of Yuuri’s wildest fantasies. Viktoria Nikiforov with short hair, it was almost too amazing to believe. No one had short hair in women’s figure skating. It just didn’t happen.

That was seven years ago. Now her short hair was old news. She wore trousers and sometimes skated to avant-garde music, testing the bounds of structure and content of a routine. She had landed the first ever quad salchow. She could do a triple toe-triple toe combination like it was nothing, like it was riding a bike. Once, only once, she had landed a quad toe-loop. Yuuri fainted when she heard the news.

On the ice, Giacometti wore a placid, pallid smile, but seemed to simmer with competitive anguish. Still behind Viktoria after all these years. Leroy was enthused beyond belief, signaling to her fans with her brand: a Sailor Moon-esque hand motion that formed her initials. It was silly, but Yuuri was glad to at least see someone having fun.

From the side of the rink, almost disappearing behind the guard, Yuuri swore for a moment that her eyes met Viktoria’s, but it was over in a flash, before Yuuri could get a read on her, before she could register _if_ it had even happened.

It hit her hard, the barrier, the distance, the envy. She could project, she could think back on every mistake, every bad decision she made, but it was fruitless. A white swath of nothingness poured like a waterfall over and around Yuuri, closing her into a private, quiet world again where she could remember with reverence the bitter serendipity. It had all happened at once, at least. Claustrophobia tasted a little like bile, a little like nothingness.

No one would care if she retired.

 

 

“You can’t leave yet,” Celestino told her, help her to pack her skates and costume. “We still have the panel to attend, plus the banquet tomorrow night.”

Yuuri groaned. “Can you imagine what kind of disaster the banquet is going to be? Showing up to it as the loser would be mortifying.”

Celestino handed Yuuri a protein bar, which Yuuri considered with temptation and disgust. “It would be shameful not to show up at all. You don’t have to be a loser in spirit, too. And our flight back to Detroit is already booked, it’s too late to change it.”

Yuuri took the protein bar and sighed, shoving it into her backpack. “Okay.”

“Do you want to go anywhere? Have you called your parents?”

He was working too hard. “I talked to them earlier. I…I think I’d like to go back to the hotel now,” she said, zipping up her rolling case. “I just need to rest.”

Celestino pressed no more and led them out to the lobby. Yuuri couldn’t bring her legs to move quickly. In it again, it seemed. In and out without warning, that despondency that took over her like a demon possessing her body. She felt herself sinking into the mold-colored linoleum floor, air leaving her lungs all at once, heat rising to her face, and—

“Yuuri! Yuuri Katsuki!”

She turned to see Morooka, a Japanese commentator, standing behind her. “Hello,” she said. Ah, her voice was too flat. That wouldn’t reflect well in an article.

Morooka pursed his lips together in a defiant way, the way men do in movies when they’re about to deliver a speech about why they want to quit their job, harvesting all the courage in them to be an idealist in the face of cynicism. How old was Morooka? She couldn’t tell. In lieu of something motivational, he said, “Don’t you even consider quitting. You’ve got so much potential. Japan is counting on you!”

That was rich. The only one counting on her was Vicchan, to eventually return home, and she had failed. “I haven’t made any decisions yet,” she said, letting her glasses catch the light so that he may not see her eyes. “Please don’t make any assumptions about my career.”

“Will you stay in Detroit after you’ve graduated college?” he pressed. “What are your plans?”

“Ah, well…” _Go away, go away_. Yuuri looked out the window. Just outside the arena stood a woman cradling a poodle in her arms. She didn’t want to think. She wanted to go home, to her family to Vik-

“ _Yu_ ri.”

Yuuri whipped around, following the voice she’d known for ages. A smooth, smoky, accented alto, the kind of voice that lilted without meaning to, that made someone feel like the rain had stopped and sunlight had broken through the clouds.

“Your step sequence needs some serious work. And you need to listen to Yakov about your jumps. Going overboard isn’t necessary—”

“It’s rich hearing _you_ tell someone to listen to Yakov.”

Viktoria Nikiforov laughed, pleasant, fine, a little flat. She cocked an eyebrow at the Russian Yuri. “Fair point! But your step sequences are still sloppy.”

It wasn’t her, of course. Viktoria didn’t know her, they’d never spoken. She and Yuri Plisetsky passed with long strides—Yuri somehow keeping up despite the massive height difference—to meet their coach at the other end of the lobby.

Viktoria seemed to feel the weight of Yuuri’s gaze, to Yuuri’s absolute _horror_ , and acknowledged her. They stared at each other for a moment, blood flooding Yuuri’s cheeks and ears in a hot wave of embarrassment and inferiority.

And then Viktoria smiled like she smiled at the awards ceremony. “Would you like a commemorative photo?” she asked.

Yuuri went cold, and she choked a little. Commemorative of _what_? Yuuri’s defeat? Their passing each other by in the lobby? Viktoria’s fifth consecutive gold medal in the Grand Prix Final? Did she even know Yuuri’s name?

Yuuri didn’t give her the chance to say it. She turned the other way and walked out the front entrance. _Idiot_. She passed the woman with the poodle. Her eyes didn’t sting from the cold. _Idiot, idiot, idiot_.

 

Celestino didn’t chase her back to the hotel. His habit of being emotionally distant did have its perks when Yuuri felt the need to be alone. The walk was biting and longer than she remembered, but maybe her legs were moving more slowly and maybe her entire body was barely holding out before collapsing entirely. She’d slept no more than three hours the night before the free skate, which would surely bite her in the ass with a vengeance once she caught sight of her hotel bed. She wished she had the mental strength to take in Sochi as she saw it. For obvious reasons, she’d been interested in Russia for a long time, and this was her first time there, she could have enjoyed it, explored it, found a bakery and bought pirozhki, done _something_. She went back to the hotel.

She hid her eyes in the lobby. Her face was so numb she wasn’t sure if she was crying again or not. Then she went up to her room, and opened the door, and walked in, and closed the door, and fell against it. And then she bawled again. Her knees gave out completely and she sagged like a ragdoll onto the bland, maroon carpet.

Yuuri sat there for a while, crying against the door. The tears slowed, and she decided to move to the bed for the sake of her back. She laid down on her side under the covers, still in her sweats and jacket, and checked her phone against her better judgement. There were enough notifications of texts to obstruct Viktoria’s smiling face, at least.

_From Yuuko Nishigori, 5:30 pm:_

How are you, Yuuri? We saw the final, want to talk?

_From Phichit Chulanont, 6:15 pm:_

hey yuu, ciao ciao says that you’re down in the dumps. what can I do?

_Phichit Chulanont sent three images._

_From Phichit Chulanont, 6:17 pm:_

the hamsters miss you!!! call me when you get the chance!!! <3

Yuuri smiled despite herself. The hamsters were cute. She missed them, too.

She missed Vicchan more.

_From Mari Katsuki, 7:30 pm:_

moms worried that you hung up on her, you should call back sometime

_From Mari Katsuki, 7:51 pm:_

are you okay????

She turned her phone off and rolled onto her back. It was rude of her to ignore them, after how kind everyone was being. It was a kindness she didn’t deserve yet, she couldn’t swallow it. After all she had done—how sloppily she’d performed, how foolish she’d been to think she deserved to be in the Grand Prix Final—

Yuuri took two Benadryl and fell asleep before she gave herself the opportunity to think too hard.

 

Someone was pounding on her door at nine the next morning, Sochi time. It was obviously Celestino—who else was there, concerned with her? He _did_ look concerned, mildly, a little frazzled. The disappointment must have been hard for him as her coach, following her to the Grand Prix Final only to watch her stumble and suffer and wallow in the depth of every misfortune that approached her without putting up a fight.

“The winner’s panel is in an hour,” he said, looking her up and down. “It’s only proper that you're in attendance.”

“Of course,” she said, and closed the door.

Yuuri showered, struggling to untangle large portions of hair. It was far past her shoulders, which seemed excessive, but she’d never been brave enough to chop it off like Viktoria had. Viktoria’s hair had always been a part of her image—how could it not be, how many people had naturally silver hair? Thinking about it now, though, she had little to lose if she cut it off. It wouldn’t hurt her image because she hardly even _had_ one.

Well. Nationals, still. That was the next thing on her plate. But returning to Japan after earning last place in the Grand Prix Final and expecting to be accepted as if she hadn’t ruined maybe her only opportunity— _ever_ —of competing on the world stage wasn’t very appealing.

She dressed in something acceptable and ate the protein bar Celestino had given her, as well as the leftover Poptart sitting on her bedside table. She felt sick as soon as it went down the pipe, but she couldn’t stop herself from eating it, but she knew she should eat something healthy like a fruit, but there was nothing in the room and then Celestino was knocking on the door again and none of that mattered because she had to drink the espresso shot can in her fridge and brush her teeth before dashing out to meet him.

They walked back to the rink, where ice dancers would have their final event that afternoon before the banquet. It stung Yuuri from her feet up through her cheeks to walk in again, having stood there the previous night, resigned, humiliated. She even saw Morooka first thing and looked away quickly so that he wouldn’t notice her.

They sat near the front at the end of a row. To Yuuri’s right were Michelle Crispino and Cao Bin and their coaches, who placed fourth and fifth respectively. Occupying most of the seats were reporters of all nationalities, all with their little notebooks, already scribbling away even though the winners had yet to appear. Some officials were in attendance, here there and yonder, some diehard fans. Yuuri’s bangs feel in her face for the sake of discretion, but it was obviously fruitless. Everyone would see her.

The podium appeared then, Jeanne-Jacqueline, Christine, and Viktoria, who radiated an unself-conscious gold quality, not entirely modest but not proud, either.

And the panel was fucking boring. None of the questions were meaningful, just _are you looking forward to Worlds?_ Of course they all were. _How was the competition this year?_ Sitting in the audience. They were all worthy, phenomenal skaters. Michelle Crispino clawed at her chair. Yuuri flushed in shame. _Are you pleased with your performance?_ JJ had the only interesting answer to this, which was how floored she was to have done so well. She couldn’t have been prouder.

And Viktoria said hardly a word, worst of all. She just nodded along, amicable, personable, but like she was off on a cliff somewhere answering in Morse Code. Yuuri wondered if she wasn’t the only one severely sleep-deprived in attendance.

It was too early to ask about next season when they were barely halfway into _this_ season, but someone asked Viktoria anyway. “I have no spectacular plans yet,” Viktoria confessed. “But that’s just for now. Who knows what might come up?”

And she said nothing else. And every reporter eyed her like they were hungry lions and her biological clock was a slab of raw meat. Twenty-seven. Most skaters retired at twenty-two, almost no women competed after age thirty.

Viktoria propped her face on the palm of her hair and surveyed the crowd. She laid eyes on Yuuri again, and neither smiled nor waved as she had done the previous night, just kind of…stared at her.

And didn’t look away.

Yuuri squirmed in her seat. It didn’t hurt her to drop her gaze for a second, but then she would look back and see Viktoria, looking, _watching_ , still. Yuuri could _feel_ her eyes boring into her skull, her neck, her collarbone, her chest. She felt like a zoo animal, like a chimpanzee, and Viktoria was one of those enthusiasts who just sat in the bleachers for hours watching, waiting for something spectacular to happen, to prove that they shared 99% of the same DNA.

This went on for about a minute, until someone directed another question at Viktoria, and Yuuri fled to go to the restroom. It was rude, but she didn’t care. She needed to breathe, and she didn’t need to notice that Viktoria stammered through her answer as if she’d been lost in thought and slapped back into reality.

What was with her? A champion would usually be happy about winning, but Viktoria just seemed to be coasting along, dissatisfied, as if the Grand Prix wasn’t enough for her. Maybe it wasn’t. There were always nationals, for both of them, and then worlds after that. And Viktoria’s program had a higher base difficulty than that of almost any woman skating.

Yuuri pushed into the bathroom and set her glasses on the counter. Her reflection was appropriately blurry, like seeing someone in the hot springs behind a fogged-over glass door or through steam. She missed the springs now more than ever, suddenly. That pang of distance that she could usually dampen with calls home and ample distractions, now there was little she could do to keep it from assaulting her like pistons. Thousands of miles. Hours of time difference. Five years.

Celestino probably wouldn’t approve of it, but maybe a visit home was in order.

She returned to the press conference feeling marginally better. When she didn’t think about how she fell twice in her free program, how she fell on a _double salchow_ —

She didn’t think about it. She thought about the immaculate curve of Viktoria’s jaw and the little age lines that had appeared around her eyes, how she never stopped changing, glimmering on the ice. Not how she looked flat, like placard, like a woman in a stock photo, sitting up at the panel, listing off rehearsed answers.

And that made it better.

 

 

Yuuri woke up with the worst hangover of her fucking life.

What had _happened_?

The banquet.

Fuck.

Yuuri felt all at once defeated, furious, and horny. She sat up and the pain in her head was like someone shooting an arrow between her eyes. How much had she had to drink? Sure, she was upset about losing, but _fucking Christ_ , it was a miracle she was even alive.

She to the mirror to assess the damages and was surprised, to say the least, to find a large black smear on her face. She looked at it closely, then saw that her hand had the remnants of something written on it—in sharpie, maybe?

Whatever the message was, it was long gone. Yuuri had slept and drooled all over her hand— _god_ she was a mess. It looked like someone had put her in a barrel and sent her careening down the side of Mount Everest. Her blue dress was unzipped and bunched up around her waist, plain black bra that did her no favors exposed. If anyone had seen that, she pitied them supremely. Her hair had become acrobatic, defiant. Yuuri Katsuki. Japanese figure skater. Some fleabag medusa with permanent tear streaks under her eyes and her tits out probably some slimy, princely guy’s number smeared into oblivion. Drooling in her sleep did come in handy.

Part of her wanted to forget it all entirely, but the masochistic glutton for punishment in her decided it was the better idea to review everything so that knew everything she was about to repress for the rest of her life. Retrospectively, Yuuri could track the measured mental deterioration she went through that night:

_Easy as Pirozhki—The Grand Prix Final of Tears and the Effectiveness of Coping Mechanisms_

_Abstract_ :

Dr. Yuuri Katsuki, PhD in Fucking Up, presents her findings regarding the correlation between number of flutes of champagne and both the fragility of her emotional state and the quality of her memory after the fact. Final data is inconclusive, as the good doctor performed this experiment on herself, and got too smashed for the sake of science to retain all necessary information.

_Introduction:_

Celestino dragged Katsuki to the banquet, much to her chagrin, and she complained more than he had ever heard her. Humiliating, humiliating, humiliating, she kept saying. Celestino really did seem to feel for her, but there was only so much he could do when she had descended into this inconsolable state. The loss was still fresh, of course, and he predicted that within a few weeks, two months at most, she would be back on her feet and skating confidently.

Katsuki didn’t expect anything good to come of the banquet. Was it fatalistic? Sure. Was Celestino worried? Always. He put a hand on her shoulder and guided her to talk with a few sponsors, mostly Japanese, a few not, in what she could only assume was an exercise in reassuring her of her worth, because see? People still wanted to sponsor her for commercials! She wasn’t a failure.

The next spokesperson was for a chewing gum, and there Katsuki drew the line, escaping to the bathroom for a few moments, then returning as discreetly as possible, tracing the wallpaper with her fingers as she made her way towards the drink table.

It’s common conception that people have a little voice in their head—a cricket, or an angel and devil who sit on the shoulders, maybe—that advises a person of what is right and wrong to do. And Katsuki had always found herself maybe a bit too communicative with that voice in precarious, high-risk, high-reward situations; the kind of situations where someone would tell her to “let loose,” and she would take a hint from the voice and politely decline, keeping herself as tightly wound as a lightbulb filament.

Well tonight she must have taken that little voice behind the toolshed and fucking shot him because she started drinking as if the world was about to end.

_Methods:_

Glasses 1-4: Not much change in mental state. Katsuki became a recluse in plain sight, standing alone and drinking alone. She had eaten a substantial dinner, so the alcohol (a negligible amount in this champagne) was not so immediately affecting her as it would on other occasions. She was, if anything, more relaxed in the shoulders, less bitter, thinking of very little.

Glasses 5-7: Here one can see the beginnings of alcohol chipping away at Katsuki’s well-fortified mental fortress. The edges of her vision started to blur, not enough to render any details indistinguishable, but enough to make the banquet hall seem rather small and a little warm. Her memory has not yet been infringed upon.

After the seventh glass, however, that previously-numbed bitterness returned with a vengeance. Being tipsy intensified the blows of shame that hit her every time she saw Yuri Plisetsky, that brat, or Chris, who wore a friendly but plastic façade, or Viktoria, who looked more immaculate than ever.

Glass 8: The bitterness towards Viktoria immediately disappeared. She was just feet away from Katsuki, wearing a slim, flattering suit that exaggerated her height, the blouse underneath unbuttoned enough to reveal a barely tasteful amount of cleavage and a small beauty mark. Katsuki had never seen that beauty mark before, and she had to knock back a flute of champagne to suppress her thirst.

Glass 9: God, she was gorgeous. How many times had Katsuki imagined Viktoria in a suit? All the photoshoots Viktoria had done over the years, fewer and fewer as she aged (which seemed odd, that her fame escalated but her self-promotion seriously decreased—but that is a paper for another day), she’d never done a photoshoot where she wore a suit. And Katsuki would know if she had. She would own it. She would have bought an autographed version of it off Ebay, two-hundred dollars be damned, Viktoria in a suit was worth two-million.

Obviously Katsuki was at the edges of reality here, caring little for actual events of the banquet. How much time she spent ogling over Viktoria in a suit is unknown, as her sense of time was almost entirely gone.

Glass 10: Celestino’s protests and coachly aphorisms mixed in with the white noise, the idle chatter of officials and fans. Katsuki no longer heard anything he said. It was awfully pleasant to be that out of things, but still felt a lingering resentment towards that Russian brat. She downed the rest of her glass of champagne and was made to feel quite brave. While there is no solid evidence, it can be assumed that flutes 1-10 were consumed in just under an hour based on Celestino’s concern for her general well-being.

Glass 11-?: Beyond this point, all memory is lost. The only evidence of what happened after was the ink smeared on Katsuki’s hand (and face), indicating that she interacted with _someone_ , it is unknown who, and that they wrote something on her so that she would remember it. It was not written by Katsuki herself, because she is left-handed and the ink was found on her left hand.

 _Conclusion_ :

Regarding efforts to make the banquet (and, by extension, the Grand Prix Final itself) more bearable by getting shitfaced, it is unclear whether or not they reaped much beneficial data. After being awake for twenty minutes and recounting her behavior at the banquet, Katsuki began to cry into her pillow, the quiet cry of a child too afraid of voicing their troubles to her family, so one must conclude that nothing, nothing had been a success for Yuuri Katsuki. But nationals were coming up, so she would get over this slump, surly.

(She didn’t.)

  

* * *

 

Yuuri chopped her hair off. All of it.

Yuuri was in shambles when Phichit found her, crying, chopping at strands of hair after they were already cut. Phichit yelled in surprise upon seeing her, and that only made Yuuri cry harder, curled up in a ball, leaning against the bed. She never left the door to her room open but she had today in a daze, distant and phantom-like, bussing between the rink and her classes and her apartment in a mind-melting cycle.

“Yuuri, here,” Phichit said, reaching for the scissors, having immediately composed herself. Yuuri knew she was easy to read, and unlike Celestino, Phichit knew how to handle her when she was in a state of distress. “Here, let me help you even it out. Let’s go to the bathroom.”

It took her a moment, but Yuuri stood and followed Phichit. They brought in a chair and sat Yuuri in front of the mirror. She looked like a starving child, face pale except for the pink of her eyes, weirdly swollen, like she was having an allergic reaction to anything and everything. And with half her hair one length, half another, she looked almost war-ravaged. A vagabond, a refugee in the wake of national shame, eyes too flat to catch the early spring light that creeped in through the window.

“How do you want it?” Phichit asked, running her hand through Yuuri’s hair. She didn’t ask why Yuuri had done it, and Yuuri was glad. She didn’t have an answer, nothing solid at least. Just a vague notion of _wrongness_ that needed to be remedied as soon as possible.

Yuuri wiped the tears from her cheeks. “I dunno…keep the bangs, but everything else short.”

 _Not like Viktoria’s?_ Phichit almost asked, but she bit her tongue. Phichit’s concern for her roommate had only increased after nationals, what with Yuuri staying in her room, overeating, not going to the ice rink. That was the strangest thing of all. That Yuuri had hardly gone to the rink to skate through her problems like she always had, that’s what surprised Phichit the most.

She wouldn’t talk about nationals, and she had stopped talking about Viktoria almost entirely. She’d buried herself in her final projects so that she could finish up and graduate ahead of the curve, but college had never been that important to Yuuri. Of course it mattered, but not as much as skating did.

“Haaah, I’m a mess, huh,” Yuuri said, looking at herself in the mirror as Phichit cut her hair.

“A slump is only temporary,” Phichit said, believing what she said. “You’ll be back in top form again in no time.”

“I fired Celestino,” Yuuri confessed.

“What!? When?”

“Just yesterday,” Yuuri said. “I didn’t cry, if you can believe it. I’m almost proud of myself.”

“Yuuri, why did you fire him?” Phichit asked. “Who’s gonna be your coach now?”

Yuuri looked into her own flat, wine-colored eyes and shrugged. “You’ll be his top pupil, now that I’m out of the way.”

Phichit pursed her lips. “You don’t have to add insult to injury.”

“What? I thought you wanted to be his top student.”

“I wanted to earn it,” Phichit said. “I wanted to beat you for it, not have it handed to me because you’re giving up. Who’s gonna coach you, Yuuri?”

She looked into Phichit’s eyes now and felt more shame than she had since the Grand Prix. “I don’t know. No one, maybe.”

Phichit nearly snipped her ear off. “So, what, are you taking a season off?”

“Maybe,” Yuuri said, and rekindled what she’d thought months ago. “I think…I think I need to go home for a while. Once we’re done with school. I was in Japan for nationals, even, and I didn’t get to see my family. Not to mention Vicchan…”

Phichit sighed and brushed some stray hairs off Yuuri’s shoulders. “You might be right.” She placed the scissors on the counter, rested her head atop of Yuuri’s, and wrapped her arms around Yuuri’s shoulders. “But don’t stay away for too long, yeah?”

Tears stung the edges of Yuuri’s vision and she didn’t try to suppress them, not when it was Phichit making her cry. “Yeah.”

“Let’s go to the rink.”

“It’s late.”

“So no one will be there! The guy at the desk has a crush on me, I’m sure he won’t mind.”

“Don’t manipulate the poor guy.”

“He has a chance with me. I know he wouldn’t have a chance with _you_ , since your heart belongs to—”

“Alright! Let’s go!”

Phichit laughed and dashed into the other room, to gather her things. Yuuri splashed some cool water on her face and took one last, long look at herself in the mirror. The short hair was drastic, an affront, almost. She felt like one of those American celebrity women, getting a pixie cut after breaking it off with her fiancé. Only skating wasn’t Yuuri’s fiancé, and she wasn’t separated from it entirely, she couldn’t be. No matter how much she discouraged herself, it always wormed its way back into her life. And every time she fell victim to it, ready, able. Even now, weighed down with seemingly self-inflicted melancholy, no career aspirations left to speak of, it still supported her, obvious, yet blending into the background like flying buttresses holding up the roof of a cathedral. Never before had Yuuri Katsuki looked like her name implied, never before had she really felt like her body suited her personality, until this moment. She put on her glasses and grabbed her skates, following Phichit out of the apartment and out towards the rink.

The hair suited her.

  

* * *

 

For a while, Yuuri liked to think that her terrible defeat at nationals was mainly because of Vicchan, but truthfully, he was often the last thing on her mind. This period of despondency made Yuuri inaccessible to her friends and family, for the world felt inaccessible to Yuuri. She felt irreparably separated, fraught with an incommunicable pain like the buzzing of bees: flagrant, unending, capricious. Sometimes she felt over it, like when she would go skating with Phichit, over herself and her troubles—they were privileged troubles to have, she felt lucky to be skating at all—other times they were so loud and constricting she thought she might suffocate. She felt like corpse wrapped in a tarp, bound, dizzied from loss of blood, drowned.

The skating helped, of course, but she had to account for her actions—namely, firing her coach and effectively dooming her career. So she tried not think about Celestino too much, not him as a person, at least, not the kindness he’d shown her when she had ever been similarly despondent. She didn’t think about Vicchan, or the waning years of his life she had missed.

But she did let herself think about Viktoria, though not as she had before. Not like she had when Viktoria had been a mere few feet away from her, at the banquet or in the lobby. She thought again to the young Viktoria, wearing the black leotard and half skirt that had sovereignty and motion as she jumped—but not nearly so much personality and zest as her hair, long, curtainlike, immaculate. The Viktoria Nikiforov success story, ever promising, ever evolving. Different incarnations of Viktoria were there, smiling at her like they always had.

 

 

Spring roared in like a demon for Yuuri, like a writhing, beautiful monstrosity. Something about it terrified her, something about it filled her with pulsations of hope. And since she was young, the time had always passed too slowly. 

It was something Minako-sensei liked to remind her of whenever they communicated, which is to say whenever Yuuri remembered to text her back. Patience was a virtue, and all that. She had been restless as she clawed her way through graduation; by then she had already made plans to go home, and the prospect became more and more appealing with each slow-turning day.

She woke every morning with a live, tangible reminder of everything she knew, and of everything she didn’t. Her mood dictated which was more dominant, so the uncertainties usually won out. But despite it all, she graduated, and then her life was fit into a suitcase, and then she was on a plane landing in Kyushu, then on a train, then another.

And all that time that had dripped like molasses and commanded her like a denizen, all of it felt obsolete as she returned home. Minako-sensei met her at the station and brought her to the inn so that her parents didn’t have to leave work. Yuuri didn’t mind—they didn’t send Minako-sensei out of lack of affection. They had to keep the resort upright, Yuuri didn’t want to hold them back any more than she already did.

“So when do you want to come by the dance studio? My students are really excited to meet you. All twelve of them.” Minako asked. Yuuri reminded her that she had just gotten home, and then Minako would apologize for pressing her, and then five minutes later she would ask something else future plans-related, something Yuuri wasn’t yet equipped to answer.

“You’re really doing wonders for my self-esteem, sensei,” Yuuri said, smiling weakly.

“That’s not a reflection of you! It’s the town. Things have become so quiet since you’ve left, everybody’s really excited to have you back.”

She seemed to mean it, and so Yuuri didn’t whip up another argument. “Is the bar doing well?”

Minako laughed. “Better than the studio, I’ll say that. You can come by there whenever, too, Yuuri.”

“Ah, you know I’m not much of a drinker usually.”

“You just need to learn to hold it, that’s all.”

“If you say so…”

“So,” Minako said with a mischievous curl to her voice. “Did you see Viktoria at all? At the Final?”

Yuuri wasn’t surprised by the question, she was sure her whole family would be on her case about it, not just Minako. And at first, she’d prepared a lie: she hadn’t interacted with Viktoria, only seen her from afar. But it didn’t seem worth it to fabricate anything. What had happened, happened.

“She didn’t recognize me,” Yuuri said.

Minako stopped walking. “She didn’t know who you were? You were her competitor!”

Yuuri nodded.

Minako sighed and shook her head, bitter at the ground. Her steps were harder, like she imagined stomping on Viktoria’s feet in defense of Yuuri’s honor. “That’s just inexcusable. It doesn’t matter how famous and successful she is, she should show respect to her peers.”

“It’s fine, sensei. I’m over it.”

“It was a bad winter for you,” Minako decided, walking again at a more leisurely pace than before. “A winter among winters. But don’t let it get you down, hon. We’re here for you next season—” and she hopscotched over her words, suddenly aware all over again that Yuuri was without coach or resources. “Whatever you decide to do.”

Yuuri thanked her and walked with her shoulder to shoulder. Her thighs were decidedly thicker than Minako’s now— _that_ would be a fun conversation, the nearly twenty pounds she had put on since the Final—and they hadn’t even _mentioned_ nationals. Or Vicchan.

Her family was much the same when she made it home. “Go pay your respects to him,” her mother said. _Him_. Not a name attached. She had expected this, the distance, the barriers. Five years was a long time, hugging her mother would have been bizarre. Too forward.

A small room was dedicated to Vicchan’s memory and an urn, no larger than a grapefruit, contained his ashes. An inoffensive incense burned before a picture of him and Yuuri when she had first adopted him, eleven years ago.

Eleven years was a good, long life for a dog, though for a little dog it could have been longer still. It reeked of neglect. She said it aloud to him: “I’m sorry, boy. I should have been here.” She should have been home, with her puppy, with her family.

The door opened and her sister, Mari, walked in, an unlit cigarette between her teeth. “Hey, squirt. Nice haircut.”

Yuuri smiled weakly. “Ah, thanks. I like yours, too.”

She lit the end of her cigarette, acknowledging the complement by merely blinking at Yuuri. “So what’s the plan? You’ve got a degree, are you gonna get a job in town or help out around here?”

“I’m not really sure yet.”

“I mean, if you want to keep skating I’ll support you,” she said with as little fervor as she could muster. “But you’ve got options. Don’t feel too chained to the past, yeah?”

“I’ll let you know what I decide.”

“Well, at least help out a little while you’re here. I’m too young to have a bad back, but I’m starting to feel like a grandma.”

Yuuri chuckled and watched as Mari exited just as she’d come, quiet, unobtrusive. Too much time really had passed. They knew everything about Yuuri, and she knew nothing about them anymore, and the bare minimum about herself.

Tears welled up in her eyes again like a premonition. She knew herself well enough to know how to react when this was happening. She kissed the tips of her fingers and pressed them to the top of that tiny urn, then went to the lobby to gather her things. And within ten minutes of being home, she was out the door again, retracing her steps back five, ten years.

“You’re going out already?” her mother called after her, not at all surprised, or offended, it seemed.

“I need to practice!”

Her mother smiled and waved, like she always used to when Yuuri left for school or dance lessons or practice, even back when practice was only recreational. “Have fun!” Maybe things weren’t that different.

She jogged through the familiar streets of Hasetsu, crisp spring air caressing her nose, willing air in and out of her lungs. They had elevated tracks at the station, better street lights at some of the busier, expanded intersections. Bumpy roads had been smoothed over, yet cracks appeared in the sidewalk where Yuuri expected them to. She felt a little isolated, like a small cell in a large organ, multiplying but never mutating.

Yuuri had begun attending skating lessons at Ice Castle when she was five years old after two years of ballet with Minako at her studio. It had been Minako’s idea at first—everybody in Hasetsu knew each other, so when the parents of Takeshi Nishigori, one of Yuuri’s schoolmates, told Minako that Ice Castle was offering free trial classes, she encouraged Yuuri to attend. The rest was history, as they said; each day Yuuri got home from school, she would ask her mother to take her to Ice Castle. She wanted to skate.

She liked the cold in the middle of summer, she liked the way the ice glimmered as if it were moving, as if it were alive, catching her blades and guiding her so that she wouldn’t fall without reason. Sometimes it seemed like an auxiliary parent, like a fairy godmother, that dressed Yuuri in the most wonderful silks of passion, motivation, ambition. It was against her nature to be competitive, yet the ice brought it out of her.

And really, she could have gone her whole life without ever competing. She could have become a skating instructor, stayed in Hasetsu, married some nondescript, supportive businessman, had a couple of kids, settled down, raised them, and died. As long as she had skating at all, she could have been content—that, Yuuri firmly believed. But content was not the same as happy.

Then Viktoria crashed into the Junior Division, and crashed into eight-year-old Yuuri’s life like the meteor that hit the earth so hard that it created the moon. And, “And the rest was history,” didn’t apply, because this wasn’t over yet. Failure after failure adorning her like badges on a military uniform, that drive to be on the ice was sustained, energized, knowing that Viktoria was out there skating. No one had ever affected Yuuri like Viktoria did, in a way she still hadn’t learned to articulate. But she didn’t need to. And truthfully, she may not have another opportunity to do so. Her career seemed as terminal as Viktoria’s suddenly, just much less scrutinized. It was hers, still, at least. She owned her career, but not herself.

 

The open sign didn’t flash in the window of Ice Castle, but Yuuri walked in anyways, calling out a careful, “Hello?” as she wiped her feet.

“Sorry, we’re closed!” called a woman’s voice from behind the counter. “We open tomorrow morning at—” Her words ground to a halt as she turned and saw Yuuri standing in the doorway. Her face transformed into a huge smile, eyes erupting with light, suddenly, and she dashed to the counter. “Yuuri! Is that really you?”

She smiled. “Yeah, Yuuko, hi.”

“Welcome back! God, it’s been so long!”

“Yeah, it really has,” Yuuri said, looking around. “You’ve taken good care of this place.”

Yuuko grinned inwardly. “Thanks! Takeshi and I have kept ourselves pretty busy doing repairs and— oh, who cares about that! How long have you been home?”

“Just an hour or so.”

“That eager to skate, huh? Go on ahead.”

Yuuri blinked, taking her hood off. “Really? Even though it’s after hours?”

“Yeah, it’s no trouble.”

“Will, uh—will Takeshi mind?” Yuuri asked, suddenly concerned. Yuuko’s husband had never been so fond of Yuuri when they were in school together.

Yuuko scoffed. “Oh pssh. Who cares what he thinks?”

Yuuri laughed unsteadily—that wasn’t a no—and sat down, lacing up her skates. She took off her jacket and beanie that she had worn for the jog over when she heard Yuuko gasp.

“Yuuri! Your hair!”

“Oh, yeah.” She ran her hand through it quickly, reveling in how soft it had become since she cut it. “What do you think?”

“It looks nice,” Yuuko said, sitting on the counter, kicking her legs back and forth. Her eyes glinted with a sudden realization. “Was there a specific reason _why_ you cut it?”

Flush crept up Yuuri’s neck, cheeks, and ears. “Got in the way,” she said, too curtly, and then she flushed deeper. She had known this was coming, being asked if it was a coming out haircut, or an effort to mimic Viktoria. From anyone other than Yuuko, it would have been a wildly inappropriate question. It seemed like a question that answered itself. Yuuri had never liked labels, so she wouldn’t label it. People would read it a certain way, and that was fine. But in her heart, Yuuri knew that it wasn’t a mimic. It was a peeling away of a constricting film. She felt less cellophane now.

“Oh, Yuuko?” she asked, standing up once her skates were finally laced up. “Will you come with me? I, uh, I’d like to show you something, if you don’t mind watching.”

“Sure thing,” Yuuko said, and she followed Yuuri out to the rink. Yuuri removed her glasses and handed them to Yuuko, then went out to the rink and did a few warm-up laps just to reacquaint herself, though she really didn’t need it. She knew Ice Castle’s rink as well as she knew the layout of her home. The five years away hadn’t changed her that much.

She skated to a stop near the center of the rink. “I’ve been working on this since my last competition,” she explained, brushing the bangs away from her forehead so that her eyes could take in all the light that made the rink breathe, and she took in all the air that her lungs could handle. She felt it in her fingertips, in the soles of her feet, in the hair that prickled against the back of her neck:

_Sento una voce che piange lontano..._

It was too dramatic a routine for Yuuri, or at least she had thought so when she first started learning it. But the more she skated, the more she felt as if the routine were quite a part of her. And Yuuri on the ice became a personification of the music, briefly, the companion she had needed in her time of despondency.

Skating _Stammi Vicino_ for Yuuko, then, didn’t feel like a performance. The jumps, they were nothing when she was alone, or nearly so. She could propel herself into the air quickly, with the right altitude and force. Even the triple flip, which usually eluded her, she executed easily, like she’d been doing it for years, like it was in her DNA. The spins didn’t dizzy her, the whittling of the strings at their arpeggios, the dip in the middle—yeah, Viktoria, what was _that_ about? Was she so despondent too?—every emotion was visceral.

It felt like a reaction, like a simple train of thought over a cup of coffee. She didn’t think through the routine, the movements just rolled out of her skin before she could register them. It happened with a stunning perfection—no music was required, not when Yuuri felt each strain, tearful or triumphant. And though it was Viktoria’s routine, she didn’t feel like she was copying her, it felt like a conversation. After all this time, all these years, there was no one who freed Yuuri quite like Viktoria did.

Yuuri finished and struck the final pose. Some days, she felt the triumph of the song was all an illusion—a delusion for self-preservation, like she was holding in all her emotions that they wouldn’t burst out for everyone to see, and the entire routine had been just that. A routine, an act. Other days, it _was_ triumphant. It was embracing the lover, they were together, inseparable. The fear was there but the hope was stronger.

Yuuko started crying, which made Yuuri about start crying. “You’re so amazing! How—when you were depressed, you—?”

“I was depressed,” Yuuri said, and she felt that she still _was_ a little bit, though she was trying not to feel so ashamed of herself. “This was the only thing that made me happy for a while. Copying Viktoria, it was like when we were kids. It really helped.”

“I’m glad to see you back on your feet,” Yuuko said. “After the Final, we were all sorry. And then nationals, and everyone was so concerned that you didn’t come visit, and, well…” She wiped the tears from her eyes and smiled. “It’s good to have you home, Yuuri. We’ve all really missed you.”

Then Yuuri felt the tears coming. “I missed you too, I—”

“Yuuri!”

“You’re back!”

“Your hair’s gone!”

Three identical five-year-old girls leapt up from behind the barrier and stood next to Yuuko, staring at Yuuri as if they were trying to dissect her. And then they continued:

“You got fat!”

“Is it true you’re retiring?”

“Are you—mph!”

“Enough!” Yuuko cried, reeling all three girls in with surprising strength. “I’m so sorry, the girls are groupies! I hope they didn’t scare you.”

Yuuri felt like the Fates had just foretold her misery, but other than that she was alright. “I-it’s fine.” Axel, Lutz, and Loop, she remembered were the girls’ nicknames. Their real names were a mystery.

“You girls better be nice to Yuuri!” boomed another voice, and Yuuri was even more terror-struck as Takeshi Nishigori appeared, skating out to join her. Rather than teasing or chastising her as he might have done in their school days, he just wrapped an arm around her shoulders in a gesture of camaraderie that was so surprising Yuuri nearly lost her balance. “Don’t worry, they’re actually _huge_ fans of yours,” he said.

“N-Nishigori! Hi!”

He grinned and pulled away. “It’s good to have you back in Hasetsu, Yuuri. How long are you staying?”

“The foreseeable future,” she said. Of that, at least she was sure.

 “You’re not retiring, are you? It’s too early for that. You can use Ice Castle to train whenever you like,” he said with complete certainty in his voice.

“Really? You’re sure?”

“Absolutely!” Yuuko chimed in, scratching one daughter’s head. “What kind of friends would we be if we didn’t let you use our rink? And what kind of patriots! You’re still the top female figure skater in Japan, it’s an honor to have you skating here.”

Yuuri laughed, made nervous by the positivity ambush. “You might be giving me a bit too much credit…” she laughed. “But thank you. For everything. I mean it.”

Maybe it hadn’t been too long after all.

 

She wanted to believe that Viktoria believed in her. That Viktoria wanted her to keep skating. It was easier than just wanting it herself, but that was true, too. She wanted it so much she could hardly breathe.

She stayed and skated for a while longer, but returned home soon after to unpack and get an early night. Most of her things had already been moved into her room—though granted there wasn’t much to move—by her family. She thanked them and announced she was going to bed, and upon entering her room, she was assaulted immediately by an onslaught of smiling Viktorias. Wall to wall, regal, lovely, dignified (not in a suit, like Yuuri had always hoped for). She was there, ever-present.

_Commemorative photo?_

Yuuri shook the thought away and got ready for bed. She wouldn’t be deterred by that simple misunderstanding. Other things could get her down, but Viktoria wouldn’t— _couldn’t_ —be something negative in her life. She wouldn’t allow it. Her admiration for Viktoria had only helped her in the past, and it would help her in the future.

 

 

 

Yuuri felt inclined to renege that previous sentiment upon learning from Takeshi that a video of her skating Viktoria’s routine had gone viral. When she woke up it had over _15,000_ views and had only been up for about three hours.

She didn’t even take time to react to it, just turned off her phone, took off her glasses, and curled back up in bed. She could imagine how everyone would react to it. Yuri Plisetsky unamused; Morooka, the reporter, incredulous; Phichit surprised and pleased; Celestino—well, Celestino wasn’t especially technologically savvy, so maybe he wouldn’t see it.

Given that Yuuri had changed her hair and gained weight, daring to perform a Nikiforov routine was incredibly forward and would likely result in career suicide. She thought about it so hard that she cried herself back to sleep, then woke up in the middle of the day and drowned out every thought in music and ran until her lungs about gave out. She went to the beach, did pushups and squats and burpees and held a plank for five minutes. She collapsed on the sand and looked at the clouds and how they looked wintery, voluptuous, and tears stung her eyes again, but she chocked it up to the uncharacteristic chill for April.

When she returned home, her mother had prepared Katsudon for her, which made her feel marginally better. She practically inhaled it, barely tasting the juiciness of the pork, then retreated to her room, feeling quite like a teenager all over again. So volatile. She had the depressive equivalent of a hair-trigger temper. She slept a solid twelve hours that night, but it didn’t feel like sleep at all. It felt like a long walk through a glacier, or maybe like dragging a dead horse around with her everywhere she went. And in her sleep, a phantasm of herself from months before, hair long and waist thin, smirked at her and repeated like a mantra: “You’re not good enough for her, you’re not good enough for her, you’re not good enough for her…

_“So don’t even bother.”_

“Yuuri! You can’t stay in your room all morning! Come help shovel the snow!”

Snow was not the first thing Yuuri expected to hear about when she woke up, around thirty hours after the video dropped, though it was a nice crisis to distract from that of the previous day. It was mid-April, Japan rarely got snow after February, snow in _April_ was a goddamn supernatural occurrence.

She turned her phone back on and checked for any outstanding notifications while she dressed, but thankfully nothing pressing or more life-ruining appeared. Hopefully the video would fade from most people’s memories as online videos tended to do after their fifteen minutes of wonder. It wasn’t that spectacular a video anyways, so she doubted it would hold people’s attention for too long, though maybe that was just wishful thinking.

And it was with this complacent train running through her mind that Yuuri opened the door to leave the inn, only to be bowled over by a dog about her height on its haunches.

She cried out and tumbled backwards, too surprised at first to register what had happened, let alone where the dog had come from. And when she opened her eyes, she wondered if she might still be in bed, dreaming.

“Vicchan?” she wondered, beholding the poodle that sat patiently on her lap, having now composed himself. “Wait, you’re not…” Yuuri mumbled, looking at the dog’s bright, round eyes.

“Ha! He looks like Vicchan, doesn’t he?” her father chirped, appearing beside her at the door. “A strange, foreign woman brought him with her. She’s in the hot spring now.”

A wash of cold confusion was immediately smothered by hot realization. Poodle. Woman. Foreign. Hot spring. Cold front.

Yuuri sprang to her feet and dashed away, her father calling after her. She hit a table with her hip on the way, nearly fell twice, got her glasses fogged up, all in an effort to prove herself wrong, to see with her own two eyes that it wasn’t who she dreamed it would be.

But alas.

She stumbled to the outdoor hot spring and saw a single occupant soaking in the water. The woman glistened in the lights, water and soap lathering her infallible, pearlescent skin. And her eyes, which just peeked out behind the curtain of silver hair, they were more blue and stormy than Yuuri could have imagined.

“Viktoria,” Yuuri breathed. _Nikiforov_ hung unspoken in the air. It was her. Good God, it was really her.

She blinked.

“Why are—what are you doing here?”

A smile grew across her lips, and she rose—completely naked, it should be noted—and reached a slender arm out towards Yuuri, not unlike a gesture they both knew from the _Stammi Vicino_ routine. “ _Yuu_ ri,” she said, with a lilt that was enough to send Yuuri to heaven right then and there. “I want to be your coach. We’re going to get you to the Grand Prix Final. And you’re going to win.”

Then she _winked_.

And Yuuri about fainted. Out of shock or terror or the sheer absurdity of the moment, it didn’t matter.

Viktoria Nikiforov was right there, standing, iridescent (and, again, naked, which Yuuri was doing her best to ignore, but it was really, _really_ difficult) and reaching out to her. Asking for _her_.

“You-you can’t.”

She pouted. “Why on earth not?”

“Because you’re _you_.” And she was Yuuri Katsuki. A dime a dozen, baby-faced ice princess from Japan who had just gained twenty pounds and chopped off all her hair. She was a nobody who hid behind her glasses off the ice and her technical shortcomings during performances. She wasn’t worthy of Celestino Cialdini, let alone _Viktoria Nikiforov_.

“Well, I can’t argue with that,” she said, retrieving a towel folded up on a nearby rock. “But I’ve seen your video. And I’ve done my homework.” Her smile was unbelievably genuine, unlike anything Yuuri had ever seen of her—and Yuuri had seen a _lot_. From posters in her room to interviews and competitions and Sochi, this Viktoria Nikiforov, now nearly bare and vulnerable, alone in a brilliant spring, was the most earth-shattering Yuuri has ever seen. She made her way across the pool and looked up at Yuuri. “Let me coach you, Yuuri. Don’t give up when you’ve only just begun.”

Yuuri bit her lip and shoved her hands into her pockets. “I don’t know. Not yet.”

Viktoria’s eyes were lidded and curious. “Don’t fret. We’ve got plenty of time.”

Yuuri blinked. She had to be dreaming, there was no other explanation. “We do?”

“Yes, absolutely,” Viktoria said.

And, heart flooded with both terror and anticipation, Yuuri took her hands.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> listen I know I'm an Idiot for beginning every chapter with a quote but I stand by that idiotic decision
> 
> thank you so much for reading!!!


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _It was a testament to Yuuri’s youth that she had expected Viktoria to be perfect in-person, too, but she’d already seen that it wasn’t the case at the Grand Prix Final. This was just another reminder of that, Yuuri’s naiveté, and it made her stomach hurt._
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> the talking and thinking and basically no skating chapter

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I mentioned in a comment last week that I would try to update on Fridays but I'm obviously disobeying that. I outlined the fic and it looks like it'll clock in around 20 chapters (yowza) so if I want to finish it before school gets really underway in mid-August then I need to kick my ass in gear. thank you for your patience with my inconsistency and thank you, as always, for reading!!!

Chapter 2

 _This is nothing like it was in my room,_  
_In my best clothes, trying to think of you..._  
 _The English are waiting and I don't know what to do_  
 _In my best clothes, this is when I need you_

The National, "Mr. November"

“She wants to coach you?” Phichit yelled into the phone. “Yuuri! It’s _destiny_!”

“No, God, don’t say stuff like that!”

“Destiny! Destiny!”

“Phichit!”

She laughed and grinned at Yuuri, on FaceTime from her new Bangkok apartment. “Alright, alright, sorry. But come on! Your coach! This is a big deal!”

Yuuri nodded. She was curled up under the comforter of her bed, the lights out in her room save for a bedside lamp. All her posters of Viktoria, all _thirty-one_ of them, were gathered together at the foot of her bed, facedown. The walls looked bare, depressed almost without her on them, though if Viktoria ever saw the posters Yuuri was sure that she’d die of embarrassment. It was a necessary sacrifice.

Phichit seemed dying for details, but Yuuri didn’t have many. And she knew exactly what Phichit was using marvelous self-restraint to keep herself from asking: _Is she everything you ever dreamed?_

“She’s only been here for a few hours,” Yuuri said, “so things are a little awkward. I—ugh.” She buried her face in her pillow. “What do I even talk to her about? She just won her fifth world championship! She’s practically a god!”

“I wouldn’t say that to her,” Phichit said. “She’s already a stranger in a strange land. Make her feel at home! Take her on a date around Hasetsu! Show her the sights.”

“ _What_ sights?”

“Oh, I don’t know, that weird ninja house maybe. That’s fun and touristy.”

“Treating her like a tourist seems contradictory to making her feel at home.”

“Whatever, you know what I mean. Do things with her.”

“She’s here to be my coach. Because of the video. That’s it.”

Except almost immediately, Viktoria had implied that that _wasn’t_ all there was, and that was something that terrified Yuuri a thousand times more than the prospect of being coached by her. “No,” Phichit snapped. “Wrong. Be friends with her.”

Yuuri choked. “ _Friends_? Phichit, you do realize that I have, like, one long-term friend other than you, right?”

She scoffed. “Your willful ignorance is one of the only things I dislike about you, Yuuri. Everybody at school liked you.”

“They did?”

“That one softball player tried to ask you out three times!”

Yuuri went cold. “She wasn’t asking me out!”

“Yes. She was. She told me.”

Yuuri thought back to that softball player. Olivia? Oh, jeez, she was really nice, too. God, she was an idiot. “Th-that doesn’t matter,” she snapped. “That’s not making friends with someone. How did _we_ even become friends?”

Phichit considered this for a moment. She reached into her hamster cage and started petting the brown one, named Howdy. “I don’t know. I think I just pestered you until you decided not to get rid of me. Invaded your personal space. Gave you bagels.”

“We made cookies together that one time,” said Yuuri.

“We nearly set the apartment complex on fire, you mean,” Phichit said. “Honestly, your mother’s cooking gene must have skipped you entirely.” Yuuri laughed. She wished it weren’t true. It was only with baking that she was atrocious, eggs and rice she could handle well. “Tell Viktoria about it.”

“No.”

“ _Yuuri_.”

“It’s embarrassing!”

“It’s funny! Give yourself more credit!”

Yuuri sighed, unconvinced. “I’ll try.”

After a few more minutes of lax conversation, Yuuri made out that she was tired and put the phone call to bed, and buried herself under her covers and screamed into her pillow.

Because Viktoria had come onto her—sort of. She’d put her hand under Yuuri’s jaw, tilting her head up as if she were going to lean in and kiss her, and she’d held her hand, and then asked if there were any _boys_ she liked. Of all the things to ask—who could think about a _man_ when they were looking Viktoria Nikiforov in the eye?

It was appalling, frankly, and Yuuri had freaked out because no one had _ever_ been so forward with her. Viktoria was smart, though, and realized what she’d done had made Yuuri uncomfortable and had kept her distance as Yuuri helped her to unpack in a stilted silence.

But then she asked to _sleep_ with Yuuri—which, coach and student or not, the intimacy was just _not done._ It was for them to get to know each other better which, granted, was probably going to be necessary for them to make any progress in fishing Yuuri out of her emotional Mariana’s Trench, but there had to be another way. She hadn’t let anybody into her room in years. And in Detroit she and Phichit had a strict agreement of privacy. No one was allowed in unannounced. Still, she’d taken down every single Viktoria poster and lovingly packed them away in boxes under her bed.

She didn’t get it, that was all. They had never formally spoken before today. Viktoria wasn’t even _gay_. Well, she wasn’t out, but then again neither was Yuuri. Though granted, the routine, the haircut, the fact that she could hardly speak to Viktoria without smiling, stuttering, or turning pink as the guts of a grapefruit spoke loudly. And she’d been in Viktoria’s vicinity for about five hours. Two of those Viktoria had been asleep.

It was a mess. It had hardly begun and it was already a mess. The first week of April had just ended and the summer bode signs of _something_ —what, well, Yuuri wasn’t sure.

She pulled up YouTube on her phone and spent about a half hour watching videos of Viktoria performing. Her junior debut, the first performance of hers Yuuri ever saw (that one she had bookmarked and she watched it whenever she was in a slump), her senior debut, her world championship short program where she broke the world record at twenty, prompting her to cut off her hair and do whatever she wanted from there on out.

It was a testament to Yuuri’s youth that she had expected Viktoria to be perfect in-person, too, but she’d already seen that it wasn’t the case at the Grand Prix Final. This was just another reminder of that, Yuuri’s naiveté, and it made her stomach hurt.

At around eleven that night there was a knock on her door from Mari. “I just wanted to let you know,” she said with an unreadable look in her eye, “that it sounded like your new coach was crying when I walked by her room.”

“Crying?” Yuuri wondered, sitting up. “Why?”

“Heck if I know. She did just come to Japan cold turkey. You should see how she’s doing, be nice to her.” Mari, deadpan as always, had infallible command over her voice, able to sound either incredibly kind or unbelievably rude with a simple lilt on a vowel. She was unpatronizing with Yuuri, despite all the available fodder for teasing. “Not to mention your English is better than all of ours. If there’s anything she needs, we’ll be relying on you to find that out.”

“Yeah,” Yuuri said. The fact that Viktoria was staying here, _living_ here, was the most foreign thing of all. Was it because she had nowhere else to stay? Was it money? Convenience? Or maybe she wanted to be close…

She put that out of her mind.

“Get a good night’s rest,” Mari ordered. “If you’re skating again, you don’t want to waste any time.”

Yuuri nodded, impassioned and exhausted, and said goodnight to Mari. She considered stopping by Viktoria’s room to check on her, see if she was alright, if she needed anything, but decided against it. Sleep was all either of them needed. They were athletes, after all. And Viktoria was an artist. Yuuri tried to dream of her dreams through a glowing, foggy window.

 

 

“Wow, this place is adorable!” Viktoria exclaimed upon entering Ice Castle the next morning. They (read: Viktoria) had requested mornings in the rink in private, and Yuuko and Takeshi enthusiastically obliged. “Lovely! Is this the rink you skated in as a child?”

Yuuri nodded, feeling a little fond. “My whole life, before I moved to Detroit.”

“It’s where you made the video as well.”

“Yeah. Uh, Viktoria,” Yuuri said slowly. “I hope you realize that…I didn’t intentionally take the video. I was skating for Yuuko, not the internet. Her daughters uploaded it without asking.”

Viktoria nodded, clicking off her skate guards. “I sort of figured that. Considering how you performed at your most recent competitions, it makes sense that you skate better without an audience.” She stepped onto the ice and started to skate high-speed laps around the rink. “Who was your coach as a child?"

Yuuri hesitated. “Minako-sensei, my ballet instructor, mainly.”

“For skating?”

“Well, I had people teach me, but the town didn’t sustain skating instructors for more than a few years at a time. Celestino was my first real coach, more or less.”

Viktoria looked at her quizzically for a moment, then picked up speed, switched edges, and spun into a jump. “Yes, I think this place will do quite well for us,” she said wistfully, making no comment about Yuuri’s coaching history. 

“Um…Viktoria?”

“Yes?”

Sometimes—and Yuuri wasn’t sure if this was intentional or not—words came out of Viktoria’s mouth _dripping_ with flirtation. It had to be a feature of her personality, or at least the Viktoria Nikiforov shell she wore that accompanied that thin smile, but it was unbearably distracting. Every time she said something with a lilt and a stronger presence of her accent, it went straight through Yuuri like a bullet point blank to the top of her skull.

It was _too early_ for her to be thinking about Viktoria that way. This was their fourth conversation, they’d exchanged maybe forty-five minutes of dialogue in the seventeen hours Viktoria had been there, and once they signed paperwork about coaching—if they made it that far—then it would be crossing a professional boundary so scandalous that it could destroy Yuuri’s career. How was she supposed to become friends with a woman who so shamelessly embodied every single one of Yuuri’s fantasies?

So she rejected Viktoria and her unintentional charm and asked, “Do you want me to skate with you? Go over jumps and such?”

“Oh, no!” Viktoria chirped, skating to the side of the rink. “No, we need to work on your weight first.” Yuuri nearly keeled over with mortification. Viktoria continued: “It’s not safe for you to attempt high-difficulty jumps when you’re not in top form. I don’t want you to get injured.”

The embarrassment abated a bit. It was probably the most genuine thing she’d said to Yuuri. She caught the words like a firefly and kept it in the back of her mind. “Alright,” she said, looking down at her thighs and hips. How she’d landed a triple flip in the video, she had no idea.

Viktoria leaned forward across the barrier and looked up into Yuuri’s eyes. “Believe me, I say it out of obligation. I must be a proper coach for you, even if it betrays my taste.”

 _Taste_? Lord have mercy. Yuuri started to sweat, and Viktoria winked again and skated off, and, as if she’d read Yuuri’s mind, went in for a triple flip.

And Yuuri died and went to heaven.

Because that—not in her costumes or suits or dresses or crisp blouses—, Viktoria smiling and going into her most iconic jump and landing it perfectly, that was the most beautiful thing Yuuri had ever seen.

“Are you excited, Yuuri?” Viktoria asked, wiping a film of sweat from her forehead.

In a wondrous daze that maybe inhibited or maybe enhanced Yuuri’s mental state, she said wistfully, “Yes.” She could feel her own body sparkle, and she could feel the creamy, critical glint in Viktoria’s eye pouring over her. Yes, she was excited. And terrified. But in the moment, a little more excited.

A grin exploded over Viktoria’s lips, like a child going up a rollercoaster. “Me too. I’ve been so looking forward to you, Yuuri. I hope we’ll do well for each other.”

Yuuri wasn’t sure what that meant, exactly. Maybe being cryptic and sexy is how Viktoria coasted through life. Though if you could skate like her, who cared what you were really like?

“Let’s get to work,” she said, stepping off the ice. “Shall we?”

“Yes!”

 

 

Yuuri was going to fucking die.

Viktoria, ever a realist about the inexhaustible flow of time, created a custom, high-intensity workout regimen for Yuuri in just under an hour. A 5K almost every day, working their way up to a 10K. Leg and ab exercises, even arm exercises, which were less necessary to successful skating, but Viktoria claimed that a well-rounded body could do anything. Not rounded in the way Yuuri already was, though, she clarified, and Yuuri tried not to be too hurt.

No katsudon in her diet, that was to be a celebratory dish and nothing more; low carb and high protein. Vegetables and nuts and berries and eggs and eggs and so many eggs, Yuuri felt like Rocky Balboa making his drink at four in the morning before going on his grey sweat suit run.

Yuuri’s routine was not so iconic, nor so inspiring. Viktoria was a fucking madwoman. Yuuri told her this once with the profanity redacted, then corrected herself, “Well, you’re a madwoman who’s won five world championships, so I shouldn’t say anything.”

To which Viktoria replied: “This is nothing like my normal routine.”

“It’s not?”

“No,” Viktoria said. “It’s much worse! I have faith that you can exceed my expectations.”

Which meant that her expectations were on the goddamn _moon_ because Yuuri was _suffering_. Though in the grand scheme of things, it was effective, she supposed. Maintaining this level of physical exertion when she was back in the rink would be difficult, or maybe it wouldn’t be, depending on what Viktoria had planned. Though sometimes Yuuri wondered if she had a plan at all.

It would have been all-around damning and miserable if it weren’t for Viktoria who, in an effort to be a proper coach, insisted on doing almost everything with Yuuri. She carried with her a knapsack, which held two water bottles, a single journal she had brought with her from Russia, and a few pens. The book was probably three-hundred pages thick and heavily used. In it, Viktoria had written—largely in Cyrillic but that which benefited Yuuri in English—notes about routines, music, emotions, costumes, exercise, calorie intake, Japanese foods.

She drew. Quite well, which surprised Yuuri for some reason. They took a break on the bench at the top of the long staircase they jogged together in the heat of the day, the one that looked over the town and graced it with an ephemeral rain of cherry blossoms. She asked Viktoria where she learned to draw so intricately, and Viktoria answered her in full:

“I went to a private boarding school for a long time—” Yuuri knew this, she knew most of the Viktoria Nikiforov Story, but not all— “and we were required to take arts classes. I was dancing and skating nearly constantly, so it was a nice, relaxing way to escape when I needed to. Plus, if I strained my hands drawing, Yakov wouldn’t criticize me because it wouldn’t affect my skating supremely.

“I’ve done some drawings of Hasetsu,” she continued, flipping to a later page. “Would you like to see?”

“Yes!” Yuuri said.

Viktoria inched closer to her and opened to the page. She’d drawn the hot spring where Yuuri met her when she first arrived, a crude attempt at the castle, which was pretty architecturally complex so her effort was quite impressive, the cherry blossom tree they sat under.

“They’re wonderful,” she said.

“I’d like to draw the people, too, eventually,” said Viktoria. “You could model for me!”

Yuuri recoiled. “Ah, I’d rather not. I’m sure some other people wouldn’t mind. Maybe Minako. She’d be a good model.” Hell, Minako would probably appreciate the attention, from the hottest woman in skating no less.

Viktoria raised her eyebrows coyly. “Do you have feelings for Minako?” she asked.

“What?” Yuuri cried, jumping back. “No no no, of course not! She’s my teacher—well, she’s a lot like an aunt to me now, I guess…”

“What about…” Viktoria rolled her knuckles on the bench. “Takeshi?”

Yuuri furrowed her brow. “What, did I like Takeshi? Like, _like_ -like?”

“Yeah.”

She didn’t outright deny it like she did with Minako. “Um…” she muttered, less bashful. It felt like a more legitimate question, a less embarrassing one, if nothing else. “Maybe when I was younger? I don’t know, he used to pick on me a lot, so I didn’t like that.” Yuuri remembered the classic Mulder and/or Scully conflict regarding Takeshi and Yuuko when they were all in school together, but any lingering feelings of attraction for either of them had long since faded.

Viktoria considered this seriously. “So have you ever dated anyone?”

Yuuri didn’t like being romantically sized up so suddenly. It wasn’t exactly her most comfortable subject. In lieu of an incriminating answer, she plead the fifth.

“No exes in town to worry about, then?”

“Ah, no.”

“What about now?”

“Th-there’s no one now.”

She seemed satisfied with that. “Well, I’ve got some stories!” Viktoria sang. “My first boyfriend—”

“Stop, please!” Yuuri cried too loudly, hiding her face in embarrassment.

The satisfaction left Viktoria almost as soon as it came. “Pardon me,” she said, seeming a little dejected. She sighed and crossed her legs, looking over the town, then around the hill. “Say, Yuuri, what’s the deal with that big, funky building? It’s very pretty.”

Funky. Not the adjective she expected, considering a certain Russian cathedral about everybody knew that was much crazier than a typical Japanese castle, but it didn’t have a negative connotation. “It’s called Hasetsu Castle,” she said, and Phichit’s advice echoed in the back of her head. “There’s a ninja house inside of it!”

Viktoria’s eyes grew to the size of moons and twinkled like stars, like a child seeing snow for the first time. “A ninja! Really? That’s so cool! Can we go in?”

“I’m not sure…”

“Oh well, no reason to fret,” she said as if it plagued her and Yuuri equally. “I would like to take a photo though!”

So Yuuri got down on one knee and took a picture of Viktoria and her immaculate smile before Hasetsu Castle. She asked Yuuri to choose the filter for Instagram, which she thought too seriously about before just deciding on Valencia. Viktoria said, thrilled, “That looks great! Thank you Yuuri.” And then, changing skins, “Now, back down the hill! We’ve got some abs to tone!”

 

* * *

 

 

“This must be a dream come true, huh?” asked Takeshi that afternoon when Yuuri ran into him at the grocery store of all places, carrying a basketful of canned mandarin oranges, roughly enough to supply a bomb shelter. Having children must be exhausting. “Having Viktoria coach you.”

Yuuri shrugged, tired. “I just don’t get it,” she said, reaching for a pomegranate, eyeing it suspiciously. “She won’t let me skate, and we haven’t talked at all about choreography or themes for this season. She just asks me all these weird, personal questions, about people I’ve _dated_ and stuff.”

“But you haven’t dated anyone,” said Takeshi thoughtlessly, walking ahead of Yuuri.

“Thanks for the reminder,” Yuuri sighed, putting the pomegranate into her basket. She didn’t even like pomegranate that much, but she was craving something sweet.

Takeshi itched the back of his thick neck. He was only a year older than Yuuri, but she had always found him to seem strikingly mature, if in appearance only. If he said anything to Yuuri now that he said when they were children it could be incredibly offensive. Girls were obsessed with idols, of course, but not commonly female idols, except for soccer players becoming infatuated with older female players. Still, those girls didn’t all grow up to be lesbians. Yuuri’s… _obsession_ with Viktoria had always been different, and Takeshi had to hear about it constantly. Not that his belligerent reactions were warranted, but, well, Yuuri got it. It was annoying. _She_ was annoying. She was weirdly fixated on Viktoria and everybody else just had to deal with it, some people with less grace than others.

His kindness about Viktoria was surprising and a little suspicious, but so was his whole air of amicability that had appeared around Yuuri. Even in high school, when he had arguably matured a bit more, his patience with her still wore thin when she showed off her new Viktoria poster or pencil bag or sticker sheet. Now he was _volunteering_ to talk to her about it. It didn’t add up.

“When will you start skating again?” he asked, looking at celery root like he’d never seen it before.

“Soon, I hope.” Yuuri pinched the bridge of her nose. He was giving her a platform. She might as well take advantage of it. “She came here because of the video,” Yuuri said. “But we haven’t talked about it. I don’t know what she saw in me in the first place to just drop everything and come here. She hasn’t even coached me yet.”

Takeshi put the celery root back, disturbed. “She’s never coached before,” he said. “Maybe she’s nervous. Taking time to figure out _how_ to coach you, or how to coach at all.” He looked suddenly like he’d swallowed something gross. “You always acted like she was so cool and smart and whatever, but she seems like a damn airhead if you ask me.”

“Takeshi!”

“What?” he exclaimed. “If you treat her like God’s gift to the earth she’s never gonna be able to talk to you!”

“I-I don’t—” Yuuri started.

He scoffed, grabbed a leek, and jabbed it towards her. “Stop being a dumabss.”

Yuuri threw the celery root at him.

 

* * *

 

Viktoria eventually posted the photo onto Instagram, which attracted a fair amount of domestic and international attention. Any suspicions swimming through the rumor mills had been confirmed: she was taking the season off. She was in Japan. She was coaching Yuuri. Strangely, it comforted Yuuri that it was public now, that made it seem less like a dream. If Viktoria ever decided to quit, though, the mortification would be on a larger scale than Yuuri liked to think about.

This continued, their stilted dialogue and training so intense that Yuuri couldn’t speak sometimes, day in and day out like the tides, with little fluctuations but a largely static presence. It was what Yuuri always admired about the sea, that it never left, it never changed, but that was not Viktoria Nikiforov.

In the two weeks she spent with Viktoria, she couldn’t suppress a constant fear that Viktoria was bored with her. It was like the tolling of a funeral bell in the back of her mind, for every run, every sit-up, every arabesque, every bath. When would she get fed up with Yuuri? When would she realize the hopelessness of Yuuri’s situation and go home?

 

“Maybe she’s just killing time,” suggested Minako a few nights later at the dance studio. “You know, parsing through her options, getting away from the spotlight."

“God, don’t say that,” Yuuri said, despaired. “That’s what I’m afraid of. I don’t want her to leave.”

“You don’t act like it. You act like she’s a baby killer and you’re terrified to even be near her.”

Yuuri groaned. “Well she terrifies me! Have you seen her? She can just get on the ice and land a triple flip like it’s nothing! I saw her do a quad salchow the other day— _in person_ —I nearly _fainted_.”

“That’s your problem, then. Don’t make a cartoon out of her. Find her faults.”

“What if she doesn’t have any?”

“ _Yuuri_.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t know if I’ve ever been this nervous,” she confessed, leaning against the ballet bar. Her feet were already sore—she’d neglected pointe in Detroit and was struggling to reacquaint herself.

Minako sighed and looked at her with a gentle, kindly critical maternity. “That’s saying a lot. Come on. Let’s give her a reason to stay.”

They practiced until Yuuri couldn’t feel her legs. Minako helped her to be vertical again and they inspected her shoes together once Yuuri had removed them. “You’re gonna need some new shoes pronto,” Minako said, to which Yuuri replied, “Or I could just not do pointe anymore.”

Minako laughed and slapped her shoulder. “You’re not getting out that easy.”

Yuuri excused herself to the bathroom and looked in the mirror, appalled. After ignoring her dance background for too long she’d forgotten how strenuous the work was, and how terrible she always looked after it. Her skin had a sticky, pulpy look to it under the sheen of sweat, her clothes were rumpled, and her hair stuck up every which way, making her look like a depressed, skinned pineapple.

They locked up and were some ways down the street Minako said suddenly, “You can come to the bar anytime, you know. Bring Viktoria with you. It might be a good bonding experience.”

“I think I’ll pass. I’m not very keen on drinking anymore.”

“Why?”

Yuuri cringed inwardly. She should have been more polite and deflective. “I got kind of…really drunk at the Grand Prix banquet and blacked out.”

Minako laughed and kicked a stone along the street. “I told you, you just need to learn to hold it!”

“No, it was horrible!” Yuuri cried, ashamed. “I felt awful for days, and Celestino kept looking at me weird in practice, and I threw up at least twice—” She looked up to see that, standing outside of Minako’s bar, was a tall woman, looking curiously into the dark windows.

The snigger that overtook Minako’s face was so greasy it made Yuuri’s fingers slippery. “Well, whaddaya know,” she muttered, elbowing Yuuri in the side, then she called, “Viktoria! Evening!”

Viktoria stood up and smiled. “Hi! I was looking for Yuuri! I’m glad I found you.”

“We were at the studio,” Minako said, putting her hand on Yuuri’s shoulder. Suddenly Yuuri felt very exposed and shabby compared to the perfect Viktoria and way-older-than-she-looks Minako, neither of whom was sweating from hours of cardio and had hair sticking up in five directions. And then Minako committed the capital offense that Yuuri knew was coming and felt powerless to prevent: “Do you want to come in for a drink?”

“Sure!” Viktoria chirped, amiable.

Yuuri murmured an I’m-just-gonna-, but Minako hooked their elbows together and dragged her along like a reluctant sack of flour as she opened the bar up, then she flung Yuuri onto a stool, where she sagged, exhausted, exasperated, and petrified.

Viktoria asked for a beer. Minako poured herself a gin and tonic and a glass of white wine for Yuuri, though Yuuri wasn’t keen on something that wasn’t her water bottle.

“So, Viktoria,” Minako began in a middle-aged breaking-the-ice voice, “do you have anyone back in Russia?”

Yuuri about blew a fuse. She glared at Minako with a _way to come on strong_ look, but Viktoria just seemed surprised. “What do you mean?” she asked.

“You know,” Minako peddled along, trying to seem casual, “like a boyfriend, or any family.”

“Oh,” Viktoria laughed. “No, nothing like that. And no noteworthy family. It was just me and the dog, and Makkachin is with me so I’m quite content here. The only people I spent much time with were other skaters and Yakov, but Yakov has not been responding to my calls and emails.” She took a long sip of beer and looked more to Yuuri than Minako. “He’s a curmudgeonly old leather boot.”

Yuuri laughed, surprised.

Minako was not satisfied with boring talk of skating and old men. “Come on,” she persisted, rapping her knuckles on the bar. Minako, too, seemed to think that talking about relationships was a good gateway conversation for Yuuri, but it wasn’t. She’d never dated anyone, she had nothing to relate or contribute, and knowing Viktoria’s rumored promiscuity, it made her feel incredibly small. “No one back home? Twenty-seven years old, a heartthrob—”

Viktoria laughed again. “Am I?”

“Come on,” Yuuri scoffed to herself.

“What?” Viktoria insisted, looking at Yuuri. “What was that?”

Cripes, she’d said it out loud. “I-It’s just, well, everyone in America was crazy about you…”

“Oh, that’s surprising,” Viktoria said, sipping her beer again and turning on her stool towards Yuuri. “I thought Americans didn’t like Russian skaters.”

She wasn’t getting the point. Even straight women would drop their metaphorical panties if Viktoria walked in the room, Russian or not, and Yuuri and her rink mates spent collective hours going over her performances, sometimes analyzing, other times fawning. “The California clubs were more competitive than us, I think,” Yuuri said, studying her knees. The blue of Viktoria’s eyes had a habit of escaping their confines and inundating whatever they were focused on, and Yuuri was too exhausted to handle the gravity of it. “But there was some…bitterness, I guess.”

Viktoria smiled, genial. “So they liked me despite wanting to beat me?”

Yuuri shrugged. “I don’t think that’s uncommon.”

“I don’t really know how it works with other skaters, that’s all,” Viktoria said, sipping her beer again. “The Russian stronghold is a little intense, I guess. You were friends with other skaters?”

“Phichit Chulanont, from Thailand.”

Viktoria let out a buzzing hum and sipped her drink again. “Must be nice,” she mumbled. Another cryptic one-liner, Yuuri noted. She wondered if they just came to her or if she kept them stored away somewhere, waiting for the perfect moment to say it.

Yuuri kept trying not to fear her, watching her sit there, so poised, so polite. She was like a regency heroine, with her perfect manners and smooth voice and fine, heavy eyes. And Minako was peeling away at Yuuri’s patience—and her stubborn resolve—like she was carving Yuuri into a totem pole. The staginess was going to drive her mad.

“Do you mind,” Yuuri started, not thinking, “that people know? That you’re my coach?”

Viktoria’s lips parted a little. She evidently had not expected the question—or any question, maybe. She looked at the goldish meniscus of the beer. “Not at all,” she said in a voice so low that maybe only Yuuri could hear it. “Keeping it a secret would imply that I was ashamed of it for some reason. It’s good they know.”

Yuuri said nothing.

They didn’t stay much longer. Viktoria only had one beer, and Yuuri took two sips of her wine before returning it to Minako. Though she was putting on a lovely brave face, Viktoria seemed pooped. Joining Yuuri in the movie star training they were doing surely took a lot out of her, but she always seemed happy when they were doing it, especially when Makkachin was with them.

With a “get out of here you crazy kids,” and a keen wave of her hand, Minako shooed them off. “It was lovely! I’ll be back!” Viktoria assured, genuine through her tiredness. If Minako expected something magical to happen on the walk back she would surely be disappointed, disappointed especially in Yuuri being unable to wring any of the intrinsic magic out of Viktoria that lied dormant, waiting to be awakened.

Small talk was made to marginal success. Yuuri’s favorite color, she decided only because Viktoria asked, was blue. Viktoria’s was burgundy. Viktoria liked trashy American pop music, her favorite ballet was Swan Lake. Yuuri’s was Giselle, and when she said that, Viktoria said, “You do have an otherworldly look to you like the Wilis, don’t you?”

It was the kind of strange thing that Viktoria just _said_ sometimes that was so bizarre that Yuuri had no idea how to feel. She couldn’t trace if it was an insult or a complement or just an observation, but Yuuri was sure it was hypocritical of Viktoria to be calling _her_ otherworldly.

“Be thinking about what you want to skate to,” Viktoria said, and Yuuri’s heart grew three sizes. Skating. Programs. What Viktoria was here for. _Finally_. Yuuri couldn’t begin to describe the relief she felt, piled on top her public acceptance of Yuuri as her student, she felt much more at ease. “I’ve got some routines in mind I’d like to run by you, but don’t let me constrain your imagination.”

What imagination? She must not have known that Celestino choreographed most of her routines of the last five years. Yuuri said, “Okay,” and wondered if Viktoria just choreographed routines sometimes that she never showed anyone, like how novelists have a myriad of unpublished manuscripts lying around.

“What do you want your skating to be?” asked Viktoria. “Or, let me rephrase: what do you want to do with your skating? You did _Scheherazade_ , Debussy, Prokofiev, _And All That Jazz_ —”

Yuuri squeaked. “You _saw_ that?” It was one of Yuuri’s first free programs in the senior division, something that was a bit of a passion project for her. In her teens—especially once she decided to go to America for skating—she became something of a movie buff, and watched a ton of American movies. She took to _Chicago_ for some reason, worked with Minako and her temporary coach, Takeshi’s father, to craft a flouncy, saucy program that suited the song. Only when she performed it at a regional competition, she crumbled under the pressure, and instead of enjoying herself, skated with a look of constipated shame, barely landing half her jumps. She managed to get second despite that, but repressed the memory of the entire experience for the rest of her days.

Viktoria just smiled at her and said, “I told you, I did my homework!”

“Well, you sure were thorough, but that wasn’t one of my prouder moments,” Yuuri sighed. She saw Viktoria’s silhouette, so broad and dignified and stately, almost like a knight, or a superhero, or a shadow cast from a thousand miles away. She took a steadying breath. “Like the time I almost set my apartment on fire.”

Viktoria barked out a surprised laugh, then covered her face. “ _How_?”

Yuuri flushed inwardly. “Trying to bake.”

“Wow!” Viktoria exclaimed, looking at Yuuri with a surprising softness. “Your mother’s cooking gene must have skipped you.”

“I’ve heard that before,” Yuuri muttered, suppressing a wince.

Viktoria giggled to herself. “I set a bar on fire once.”

Yuuri stopped dead in her tracks. “Like a bar or like a _bar_? A whole building?”

“The whole building,” Viktoria said, dead serious. “I was so drunk that I kept singing the French national anthem, and I got everybody else to join in, and it got so raucous that vodka was sloshing everywhere, and the bartender got mad at us for being so loud, and an acquaintance of mine, drunk beyond repair, got in a fight for my dignity, and he socked the bartender so hard that his cigarette flew out of his mouth and everything went up in flames.”

Yuuri choked out a laugh, louder than she had intended. “Sorry, sorry.”

“It’s fine! It’s funny!” Viktoria grinned at her and started walking.

“Did you get your dignity back?” asked Yuuri, trying to be facetious for the sake of comedy but ending up sounding just plain stupid.

“Obviously not,” Viktoria answered immediately. “The prototypical western tourist acting like a fool in a foreign country. And with how much fun I’ve had being that, there’s obviously not a shred of pride left in me.”

Yuuri laughed again. She appreciated the mental image of Viktoria singing the Marseillaise arm in arm with burly Russians, shirts stained with vodka, patriots offering a noise complaint. She wouldn’t tell Phichit that she had taken the advice though. Wouldn’t give her the chance for an “I told you so,” though it was well deserved.

“I got us off-topic,” Viktoria continued. “What do you want your skating to be?”

Yuuri returned to reality and thought through the outstanding question a little harder. “I guess I want to do what you’ve always done: what I want.”

“How do you mean?”

Yuuri shrugged, feeling a little embarrassed. “You’ve always seemed to love what you were skating. And you always managed to surprise people.”

Viktoria considered, slowing her pace. “Surprising people and doing what you want are two different things, Yuuri. Bear that in mind.”

“Ah, sorry…” She looked at Viktoria’s feet in their shiny loafers, the thin, pale ankles, the slope of her muscled calves. “Which was _Stammi Vicino_?”

Other than in indirect terms, they had hardly spoken about _Stammi Vicino_ , either of their takes on it. Yuuri had feared that Viktoria would break it down with her, point out every flaw and change, like when Celestino went over performances after a competition. With other routines, it wouldn’t be so much of a problem, but _Stammi Vicino_ felt sacred, somehow.

“ _Stammi Vicino_ ,” Viktoria began in an immediately somber tone, looking upwards. The light pollution in Hasetsu was not so bad as in other parts of Japan, so the stars were clear. Yuuri used to sit on the roof of Yu-topia with her father and learn all the constellations, on by one, until she had memorized all of them. “If I didn’t perform _Stammi_ _Vicino_ ,” she said, “I wouldn’t be able to live with myself.”

She picked up her stride again, drawing her eyes away from the North star and back to the clean, white streets. _Stammi Vicino_ , while classical and triumphant, did have that desperate interlude. When Yuuri skated it, she felt like she was wallowing. When it was Viktoria, it seemed almost like a cry for help. Yuuri didn’t know what else to make of what she said, so she just jogged a few steps to catch up with Viktoria.

And then, suddenly, “You seem afraid of me, Yuuri.”

Yuuri froze in place, which was probably an answer in itself. Viktoria went a few paces ahead before realizing that Yuuri had stopped, then turned to walk back to her.

“I apologize,” Viktoria said, looking somewhere around Yuuri’s neck. The wind was throwing the curtains of Viktoria’s hair every which way, only occasionally revealing to Yuuri the cut of her jaw, the glow of her too-blue eyes, the absence of a curl to her lips. “I don’t mean to scare you.”

“It’s not you,” Yuuri said carefully, trying to will relaxation into her shoulders. “I guess it’s just strange. I was a fan of yours for a long time,” she confessed, examining Viktoria’s loafers, “so having you here feels unreal.”

“I see,” Viktoria said in an unpatronizing whisper. There was no one in the street to infringe upon their conversation, but Viktoria’s voice made it sound like they were sharing a tent in the woods at night—remote, private, intimate. “Well, I’m certainly real. You’re the one who’s eluding me.”

Yuuri looked up. “What?”

Viktoria smiled. “You just flicker in and out like a firefly. Sometimes I think you’re here and other times you pass right through me without a word.” She chuckled, “Is there a grave I have to offer lilies to?”

A warmth of embarrassment washed through Yuuri. “N-no. Sorry.”

“Don’t apologize,” Viktoria said. “You haven’t done anything wrong. That’s when you’re hard to find.”

Well, that wasn’t something Yuuri could remedy overnight, her compulsion to apologize. The surprise that Viktoria was the kind of person to speak in ridiculous, frankly pretentious metaphors wore off almost immediately and sank in as a comfort. Minako would be proud of Yuuri: she’d found a fault.

It made her laugh, a little louder than she probably should have, and Viktoria’s face contorted in confusion. Every facet of her face was mobile and malleable, her eyebrows traveled miles apart from each other, one up and one down as she stared at Yuuri.

“S-sorry,” Yuuri said again, mentally slapping herself. “We should go back to the inn.” She sidestepped Viktoria and started down the hill, seeing the lights of Yu-Topia shining just around the corner. After a moment, she glanced over her shoulder and saw Viktoria watching her walk off, looking supremely distant, her brain like a beehive so filled with noise that it all turned into nothing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hahaha sick young frankenstein reference
> 
> thank you for reading!!!


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _"You’re not good enough for her."_
> 
> _Fine. She wasn’t. But she would be._  
>   
> 
> In which Yuri Plisetsky arrives in Hasetsu and Yuuri Katsuki discovers and subsequently smothers her true Eros.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm posting this now because who has an update schedule? I don't. I just want to get it out there. this is my first of probably fifteen guilty pleasure moments in this fic so you have to deal with THAT now. also I'm changing the ratings and tags a bit just to be on the safe side. I don't think the scene in here is necessarily explicit, but better safe than sorry. enjoy!!!

Chapter 3

_Yes there were times, I'm sure you knew  
When I bit off more than I could chew_

Frank Sinatra, "My Way"

With the benefit of hindsight, the arrival of Yuri Plisetsky in Hasetsu was not at all surprising.

Yuuri Katsuki was not thinking about hindsight when Yuri Plisetsky was stomping on her face. Yuuri was thinking about changing her name and fleeing to Okinawa where no one could find her, not the press, not Yuri Plisetsky, and especially not Viktoria.

The day. The _day_ Yuuri was allowed back on the ice. Her weight was back down to a safe number. She and Viktoria had even discussed programs a little bit, what Yuuri was comfortable with, what she wasn’t. It wasn’t much, but it was progress.

And that progress was about to be either reset, demolished, or infringed upon. Yuri was screaming at her in heavily accented English that, “It’s all _your_ fault, you stupid pig! Viktoria promised me a new program but you dragged her away!”

“What are you talking about?” Yuuri cried, rolling out from under Yuri Plisetsky’s foot and staggering to her feet. “Is this about the video?”

“You—” Yuri growled, sizing Yuuri up with a malicious, fast eye. “You must be really fucking stupid.”

Paparazzi were gathered outside the doors to Ice Castle, eagerly documenting and reaching to fathom what the conflict between the two Yuris could be. Yuuri Katsuki gave Yuri Plisetsky a meaningful look and said, “Let’s not do this here, yeah?”

“What? Scared?” she asked, sneering. “Don’t want people to see you crying like you did in the bathroom?”

Deep breaths. She was only fifteen, barely. Yuuri could drop kick her into the ocean from the cherry blossom hill. And lord, she wanted to, no doubt, but someone had to be the adult. So she offered Yuri Plisetsky a relaxed smile, peppered with just a bit of mischief, and said, “Viktoria came of her own volition. I’d never even spoken to her until she showed up. If you have something to say to her, you can do that yourself.”

Yuri Plisetsky bristled. Satisfied, Yuuri proceeded into the locker room to change into her skates. Behind her she could sense Yuri Plisetsky following with an intentional bow-legged gait, something that made her seem to take up more space than she did. Tiny thing. Yuuri was only five-three, Yuri Plisetsky couldn’t have been more than four-nine.

They entered the rink together, and immediately Yuri Plisetsky softened. The ice had that effect on skaters, it always had. No matter how contentious or anxious or terrified a skater was, they were always settled by the ice, by returning home after a long journey.

“Are you skating that?” Yuri asked.

Viktoria was on the ice, practicing something that, at that very moment, entailed a clap, a swish of the hips, and an elegant slide into an inside spread eagle. “I don’t think so,” said Yuuri. “We haven’t discussed programs yet, though.”

“You haven’t even—!” Yuri Plisetsky bit back the latter half of that insult and took a long, steadying breath. “Viktoria had been practicing that for a while before she left,” Yuri said. “She started it not long after the Final. Some weird, sexy, gay crap. But she couldn’t decide between that and something else. Trying to be so cool and surprise people, whatever.”

Yuuri felt herself turn the color of a tomato, momentarily preoccupied with someone familiar with Viktoria calling her _gay_. When Yuri Plisetsky was relaxed, she spoke in a smooth, steady voice. Nothing about her suggested worldliness beyond her years, but she seemed to strive for it, and having been in the company of Viktoria for so long, Yuuri could understand why. She had illustrious shoes to fill. They both did.

“HEY VIKTORIA!” Yuri Plisetsky screamed so suddenly that Yuuri Katsuki let out an unintentional cry. So much for calm. “YOU SURE LOOK LIKE YOU’RE HAVING A GOOD TIME NOT MAKING GOOD ON YOUR PROMISE TO ME YOU SELF-CENTERED BASTARD!”

Viktoria stopped skating, and fear settled in Yuuri stomach. If there was going to be a face-off between two Russian skaters, either of whom could take Yuuri in her sleep, she didn’t want to be around for it.

“Ahh, Yuri!” called Viktoria, unaffected and genial. “Good to see you! Did you fly all the way out here just to yell at me? What dedication!”

“You’re a bitch,” spat Yuri. “And a traitor! Leaving Russia for _this!_ ” She indicated Yuuri with a profane gesticulation.

“Yuri, please don’t insult my student,” she said, skating over to meet them at the barrier. “So, I forgot something important that I promised, eh? This couldn’t have been done over the phone?”

Yuri kicked the barrier, and Yuuri Katsuki wondered when she would run out of noisy intimidation tactics. “You promised to choreograph my senior debut,” said Yuri Plisetsky with a bitterness dripping off every word, voice breaking like that of a pubescent boy, or like someone on the verge of tears. “I won junior worlds without going overboard, just like you told me, and you just fucking left! For your Japanese skank!”

“ _Yuri_!” Viktoria said, and Yuuri saw the cliff she had almost fallen off. That she had almost lost her cool. She cleared her throat and smiled again. “Let’s take a moment, shall we?” She stepped off the ice and put on her skate guards, regarding the two Yuris with a cool, calculating gaze, devoid of the kindness she had shown Yuuri Katsuki or the camaraderie she must have shown Yuri Plisetsky.

Yuri exuded the aura of a motherless child, or rather the kind of child who wanted a mother so bad that, once they finally had it, they rejected it, out of disappointment, out of rage, out of betrayal. Every facet of Yuri breathed of youth, the stylish shoes, the new shirt that Yuuri had seen at the mall just the other day, the thickness of her hair, the rawness of her feelings she was working so desperately to conceal, so naïve she put a wet poultice on a wound before the bleeding stopped.

Also Yuuri didn’t know what she had done to warrant being called a skank, it was pretty obvious she was as prudish as 23-year-olds come, but she allowed it for now.

Yuri and Viktoria disappeared together into the locker room, and so Yuuri, taking this as a cue that she could do whatever she wanted for a few minutes, took off her skate guards and stepped tentatively onto the ice.

It had been weeks since she’d been allowed to do anything other than her basic edges and laps around the rink. Viktoria’s training had been effective and occasionally enjoyable, but ultimately the rink was where Yuuri belonged.

After a few relaxed laps around the rink, she sped up and went in for a double salchow. It was one of the easiest jumps, one of the jumps she could land most reliably, except at the Grand Prix Final, when she had flubbed it consistently out of nervousness. But alone in the rink, in-shape and determined, she landed it like it was nothing.

“Yuuri! I’ve just had—Yuuri!” Viktoria called, running back into the rink. “You shouldn’t be doing jumps when you haven’t warmed up!” Yuri Plisetsky followed her back looking like she had just swallowed a bee, while Viktoria looked like she had just splashed her face in the fountain of youth.

“A-ah, sorry,” Yuuri breathed, and she skated to the side to meet them again.

“I’ll let it slide, just this once,” she chirped, winking. “Yuuri, I’ve just had the most wonderful idea!”

“Great,” said Yuuri.

“This is fucking stupid,” growled Yuri. “You’re wasting your time here with some fatso who can’t land a fucking loop. I can do a quad salchow!”

Viktoria was unfazed. “Please watch your language, Yuri, it’s unladylike to be so vulgar.”

“Suck a dick!” she snapped back. “You’re being so shitty! We’re going back to Russia and you’re going to choreograph my program!”

“Possibly,” said Viktoria.

“What?” said Yuuri and Yuri in unison.

Viktoria grinned. “You two are going to compete! I’ll develop short programs for both of you, and I will do the bidding of whoever surprises the audience the most!”

Not great. Terrible. “What the _fuck_?” said Yuuri before she could stop herself, and she immediately covered her mouth. Betrayal couldn’t _begin_ to describe what she was feeling. It was somewhere between falling through ice and being catapulted into the sun, neither of which was pleasant for her skin or insides or quality of life.

Before she could say anymore, Viktoria had disappeared to speak to the Nishigori family about competition arrangements. Maybe she was just hungover. She’d been spending a lot of nights at Minako’s bar, so many that Yuuri began to suspect something on the order of casual alcoholism. She couldn’t tell if that was prudish reservations or wishful thinking to justify her bizarre behavior.

Yuuri found out later that day that arrangements had been made for, “Hot Springs on Ice! An intense competition where Yuuri and Yuri would go head to head in a battle for Viktoria to coach them in the upcoming season! More excitement than these grey streets of Hasetsu has seen in ten years!”

The girls came up with the tagline and Viktoria had evidently loved it, so she disappeared with her journal and iPhone and skates, and kicked Yuuri K. and Yuri P. out of the rink so that she could develop their programs in artistic solitude.

“This is so stupid,” growled Yuri P. to herself, lounging in the locker room and looking at her phone. “What does Viktoria see in this place? There’s nothing to do here. I can’t believe she left Petersburg for a dump like this.”

Yuuri tried to dredge up some courage to defend her hometown, but she had felt similarly when she was Yuri Plisetky’s age. Cramped, exposed, limited. The nostalgia she had for it, though, after all these years, helped to make up for its outstanding flaws.

Then, “Where’s Viktoria staying anyways?”

“At my home,” said Yuuri.

“Gross!” yelled Yuri. “She’s sleeping at _your_ house?”

“We weren’t going to make her stay in a hotel. She has her own room.”

“Oh, yeah, that would be expensive…” murmured Yuri. She had even less foresight than Viktoria did.

Wait. Fuck. “Where are _you_ staying?”

Yuri Plisetsky was, alarmingly, silent. Deer in the headlights look.

Yuuri buried her face in her hands.

“I didn’t think I would even be staying here! I thought Viktoria would just come back to Russia without all this stupid bullshit!”

“She’s been here for a month,” said Yuuri, exasperated.

“And she hasn’t been able to choreograph a routine for you since you were too fat for it,” snapped Yuri.

Yuuri tried not to be so hurt by that, though it was true. She was still only grasping at the concept of thinness, and her figure would have pudge to it no matter what she did, that was unavoidable. What annoyed her more was that this 75-pound middle schooler knew exactly which of Yuuri’s insecurities to light a fire under. She wanted to tell Yuri Plisetsky off, say that she’d already gone to hell and back with puberty, and once that fucking toddler actually hit it she wouldn’t be acting so high and mighty.

But she didn’t say that. She just looked at the door to the rink, trying to see if she could catch a glimpse of Viktoria through the small window. What was she thinking about? What was her plan? Did she have one? What had she said to Yuuri the day she arrived?

_Don’t fret. We’ve got plenty of time._

Yuuri got to her feet and announced that she was going for a run, leaving Yuri Plisetsky to her own devices for a while. She jogged the necessary miles down to that spot on the beach she so liked, where the sky seemed to really be part of space, stretching out and forever into every type of nothingness.

 

Yuri Plisetsky was bath when Yuuri finally got the opportunity to speak with Viktoria alone.

Viktoria was settled on the little loveseat in her room she had bought or had shipped in, maybe, an English magazine open in her lap, hair freshly washed and face free of makeup, enough so that Yuuri could notice a strain of faint, pinkish freckles she had never seen before.

Yuuri didn’t know if it was monumental or not, that Viktoria had freckles. She didn’t have freckles on any of the posters or in any of the interviews or routines. She hadn’t had freckles in the month she had been with Yuuri. This was a fresh, natural, comfortable Viktoria. Was Yuri Plisetsky’s presence really so reassuring for her?

“I trust you had a good day,” said Viktoria, eyes unfocused on the article about efficiency living for families. “Congrats on reaching your goal weight! I’m glad we can start skating.”

Was she? It felt like a stagy thing for her to say after everything else she’d done today. “Viktoria,” began Yuuri, tentatively. “Why are you doing this competition?”

She flipped the page idly. “I think it’ll be good motivation for you and Yuri! She’s a little overconfident, I think working with someone as experienced as you might bring her down a peg.”

“No, Viktoria,” said Yuuri, her voice trembling. “Why did you come here in the first place if you were going to leave so easily?”

Viktoria looked up, finally, wide-eyed. “I’m not going to leave.”

“We’re competing to see which of us is deserving of you as a coach!” cried Yuuri, her hands balled into fists. “If I lose, you’ll leave.”

“You won’t lose,” said Viktoria.

Yuuri bit her lips. “Just saying that won’t make me win. No matter how hard I’ve worked for other competitions, it didn’t matter when I was actually competing, I still—”

“Yuuri,” Viktoria said, her voice hard and raw, her eyes transparent. “You won’t lose. If you want me to stay, then you won’t lose.” And she returned to her magazine.

It was a cruel thing to say. Yuuri turned it over in her head a hundred times during the silence before dinner, and even while Yuri Plisetsky and Viktoria reminisced over katsudon, the katsudon Yuuri couldn’t indulge herself with.

They talked so comfortably. They must have known each other for years now, and spent thousands of hours training together under Yakov. The closest person Yuuri had to that was Phichit, who was a wonderful friend and skater, but Yuuri had only known her for about three years. Yuri Plisetsky and Viktoria acted more like siblings than anything.

Evidenced further by when Mari came in to remorselessly drag Yuuri away from her guests to help clean the storage room where Yuri Plisetsky would be staying.

When Mari saw her, she squealed and fawned for about half a minute about how Yuri looked like an idol she had loved in high school, and though Yuri Plisetsky didn’t know what idols were, Yuuri got the feeling she would have taken that as a compliment.

“But we can’t have two Yuris,” said Mari, steamrolling her voice back to flatness. “She can be Yurio, that’ll make it easier.”

The nickname didn’t go over well. Yurio seemed instantly incensed, but Viktoria just cheered that it was adorable and said that all the Russian skaters should start calling her that, too. Yurio threatened to scalp Viktoria but said that her hair was too thin to get a good grip, and they playfought from there.

When Mari wasn’t looking, Yuuri got up, grabbed her things, and jogged right out the front door of the inn back to Ice Castle.

It was callous of her to avoid responsibility, but she needed security. She thought the beach had been enough, but something was still missing, some semblance of home, of closeness.

Takeshi, in one of his continually baffling gestures of friendship, had made Yuuri keys to the rink so that she could practice whenever she wanted, provided it wasn’t already booked. Eight o’clock at night was not when most people skated recreationally, but it wasn’t recreation for Yuuri. Tonight, it felt dire.

She just practiced her edges again for she didn’t know how long. She didn’t need to do anything special, just hear the gentle scrape of the blades on the ice, how it echoed around the room like a sonar, bouncing off the walls and windows and barriers and glass. Someone must have cleaned the ice recently, so she could just barely see her reflection. She looked almost like she had at the Grand Prix Final, barely any baby fat under her chin or around her stomach. Her thighs would always be… substantial, but they were more toned than ever. But the hair.

She sighed and looked up at the ceiling, at the moonlight spinning down so gently, like a spotlight, or maybe just a candlelight for when she was alone. The air of the rink had never felt so soft.

The hair kept her from restarting, she decided, from retracing her steps to where she was at the Final, at Nationals. It was one foot in front of the other. Not looking back was all she could do to keep her cool.

_You’re not good enough for her._

Fine. She wasn’t. But she would be.

 

* * *

 

“I can’t skate to this!” shouted Yuuri and Yurio in unison the next day.

“You can and you will!” chirped Viktoria, bubbling over with pride. “Remember, I’ll do whatever the winner wants! Think of all the possibilities!”

Yuuri, just this once, disregarded the layered meaning in what Viktoria said. She was too occupied with the crisis at hand to deal with a crisis she would probably never encounter after all. The fact that they were skating opposite arrangements of the same piece wasn’t what bothered Yuuri so much, not after hearing how different they were. It was the assignments.

Of all the themes Viktoria could have chosen for her, sex was the worst-suited option. Without question. She wasn’t just a virgin. She was an extra-super- _double_ -virgin. She had never been on any dates. She had never even kissed anyone.

Society, at least, gave her some comfort in this regard, occasionally, reminding her that virginity was just a concept and no one was defined by who they slept with (or the complete absence of sexual partners). And once or twice a week (read: whenever she masturbated) she had to remind herself not to feel guilty or weird or gross, because ultimately, she was a person away from her sexual fantasies.

Except, with skating, she wasn’t. There was no way she could skate in a way that represented her as a sexual being without being so ashamed that she’d rather just die the virgin in some pagan ritual.

“There’s no way I’m skating to some bullshit froufrou church music!” Yurio was shouting whilst Yuuri eased her brain and vagina through a panic attack. “I’m in the senior division, I should be skating to something cool!”

“You asked me to choreograph your program, you got what you wanted,” said Viktoria. “And if you win the competition, I’ll come back to Russia with you, right?”

Yurio bristled, but looked away. “Right.”

“What about you, Yuuri?” asked Viktoria. “What are your terms?”

No way, she could _not_ give a steady, unbiased answer right now. Not with everything she had to deal with. _Eros_ and _Agape_. Why had she given _Eros_ to Yuuri? There wasn’t a sexy bone in her body, she’d never tried to be sexy, not even as a joke.

What did she want Viktoria to do for her? What did she want to do _with_ Viktoria?

Why was Viktoria here?

“I want you to stay,” she said slowly. “And be my coach, and eat katsudon with me after I win.”

A smile blossomed over Viktoria’s face. She looked incredibly young some days, new and excited and alive, blood dancing through her veins, behind her cheeks. The way she regarded Yuuri was pure, and it was not. “Wonderful,” she said. “Let’s get to work.”

 

 

“I can’t believe she skated that!” cried Yuuko, taking her lunch break with Yuuri in the back office. “I can’t believe she choreographed that with you in mind!”

“Don’t make me think about it,” said a still dizzy Yuuri, burying her face in rice. Yurio got to skate something emotive and respectable, something out of a ballet, almost. It was weird seeing Viktoria skate the _Agape_ routine. Not surprising, not like it would be for anyone who even barely knew Yurio personally, but it was such a demanding piece that stamina and technical mastery would be required to perform it without spinning out physically. To express the emotions of the piece through such strenuous step sequences would be challenging for anyone.

 _Eros_ was slightly less exhausting, though each routine had the same base difficulty. However, instead of something _decent_ , Yuuri was to skate a glorified mating ritual, like those weird tropical birds did in nature documentaries. It was all hip and ass and spread eagle after spread eagle. The jumps were high and landings showy, and the way Viktoria flipped her hair and shot a sexed-up look at Yuuri at the start of the program was almost enough to _impregnate_ her.

Basically she couldn’t fucking do it because it was ridiculous and over-the-top and not at all within the bound of her personality.

“I can’t skate it,” she told Yuuko, and suddenly her mouth felt chalky. “She’s setting me up so that I inevitably lose and she can go back to Russia.”

“Stop it,” snapped Yuuko, pointing her chopsticks at Yuuri like a schoolmaster pointing their baton, and also like Takeshi jabbing at her with a leek. “Don’t be so fatalistic! Look on the bright side!”

Yuuri stiffened and popped a cherry tomato into her mouth. “I really don’t think I’ll win this.”

“Yes, you will,” said Yuuko easily. “Come on, she’s all but giving you the win. Everyone in town is gonna be surprised by seeing you skate that, they all think you’re so innocent and polite.”

Because she _was_. Well, mostly. She’d figured a few things out, she wasn’t ignorant of her own biology. It was other people where she failed. She didn’t know how to woo. She was slightly less frumpy than when she’d come home, if nothing else. And when she was skinny, some guy had written his number on her hand at the Grand Prix banquet, so that was something. But that was when she’d looked straight.

They finished lunch in silence, and Yuuri returned to the rink to find Viktoria skating rhythmic laps to _Eros_ , which played over the speakers. Yuuri took off her skate guards and stepped onto the ice, feeling it comfortably under her, so comfortably she’d never get over it.

She was complaining too much, but the shock had yet to start wearing off. She would give it her all no matter what. Viktoria had to stay. Her career depended on it.

“Hello Yuuri!” said Viktoria, still so satisfied with herself for coming up with this dichotomous scheme. It wasn’t that clever. Yuuri knew she shouldn’t be so scathing, but she had almost never felt so bitterly towards anyone. “Just who I was hoping to see! I want to talk about composition.”

Well, it was positive interaction, if nothing else. They would work together, they would _skate_ together. Finally, they could be professional. “Sure!” said Yuuri, almost running forward to meet her.

“What jumps do you think you can land?” asked Viktoria, leaning casually on one hip. The slim sweatpants she wore had only serviced the allure of her performance of the routine, drawing an unfortunate (or fortunate, depending on your perspective) amount of attention to her ass. It was unfortunate for Yuuri because she couldn’t help but melt at the spectacle of Viktoria skating something so blatant with thin fabric clinging to every inch of her legs—Yuuri was getting off topic again.

“Toe loop is my best triple,” she said. “I’ve never landed a triple axel in performance, but I have in practice. I think I could do it!”

Viktoria smiled brought a finger to her soft, recently glossed lips. “That’s what I thought. I think I’ll work more in-depth with Yurio first, you can brush up your basics in the meantime, alright?”

Yuuri deflated. “Oh. O-okay.”

“I’m not going to teach you something that you can’t do yet. It won’t be good for your retention or morale.”

“Right.”

“Why do you think you can’t land the triple axel in competition?” asked Viktoria with an honesty Yuuri hadn’t expected. “You’re strong in other facets, your step sequences and spins, and you landed all the jumps in the video. When you have the skill to win, why don’t you?”

Yuuri sighed, resigned. “Probably because, well… I get really anxious before performances, and I guess I just lack confidence.”

“I thought that might be the case,” said Viktoria in a silky voice. “It’s my job to help build up your confidence so that line between practice and performance is blurred.” She glided forward until she and Yuuri were chest to chest. And she reached forward, cupping Yuuri’s chin and parting her lips with the lightest, warmest brush of her thumb. “I’m sure that there’s a side of you that the world has never seen before, something powerful smoldering just beneath the surface. You may even be unaware of it, but I believe in you, Yuuri. I’m certain it’s there.” Her nose brushed up against Yuuri’s, their mouths were so close that she could feel her lips, so close there might as well be no millimeters of space between them, and what was time anymore? “Can you show it to me, Yuuri?” she asked in a smoky whisper. “Can you do that?”

“HEY QUIT BEING NASTY YOU TWO I THOUGHT _I_ WAS SKATING FIRST!”

Yuuri went from on fire to zero Kelvin in about a second at hearing Yurio’s childish voice, and suddenly all contact with Viktoria was cut short. “Right, right,” Viktoria called, skating away from Yuuri, as if none of that had happened. “Try to find out what your Eros is, my Yuuri. I’ll check in with you later.”

Nope. It definitely _had_ happened. Viktoria just didn’t care. It was easy goading to get a rise out of Yuuri. God, she must have been bug eyes and beet red so close to Viktoria. They’d never touched so intimately before, and yet somehow it had almost felt genuine. 

She needed a cold shower.

 

 

Yuuri exercised in an intense silence with Takeshi until it she was too exhausted to continue, _Eros_ on repeat in her ears. Before Yurio or Viktoria finished up at the rink, Yuuri trudged home, backpack and skates heavy with the complete lack of progress that had been made these past two days.

She wanted to skate more than anything. Viktoria had to know that by now. It had to be a test of her mental fortitude, her dedication, her determination. If Yuuri was truly a Grand Prix champion in the making, then she would overcome her reservations. She would find an Eros, somewhere.

Her family was busy when she returned home, cooking, cleaning, scrubbing the baths, portioning bath salts. Yuuri offered to help, but Mari said that she looked too wrung out and stringy to do any good, so they dismissed her to bathe and take a nap before dinner.

It was causing her more torment than it realistically should. She was a goddamn adult. Just because she was an extra-super-double-virgin that didn’t mean that she didn’t have any concept of female sexuality. She’d seen movies, had friends who had had sex. Hell, her _parents_ had to have had sex at least twice, but, well, that was something she didn’t really want to dwell on.

Minako could be a resource, she thought, drying off her hair from the shower and pulling on some clean sweats, though with Minako’s propensity to meddle and Viktoria’s fondness for the bar, she would surely let something slip, and Yuuri had to surprise people.

Between her body and her brain, it was hard to tell which was more exhausted, so she settled into bed for a nap without setting an alarm, just noting the time and trusting her internal clock to rouse her when she got hungry. It was good for that, at least.

Eros. What did Eros mean to her? She’d heard the word before, reading Socratic dialogues in college. There were some six different types of love: Agape, Eros, Philia, Ludus, Pragma, Philautia, something like that. Eros was the most outstanding for everybody, of course. Sexual love. Pleasure layered upon pleasure. But was Eros a possessiveness of beauty or could erotic love coexist with emotional love? Yuuri wasn’t sure. It sounded like the hedgehog’s dilemma.

She turned off her lamp and rolled over under the covers, looking up at the ceiling. Did she need to think about what _she_ found attractive or could she, well, make something up? Pleasure layered upon pleasure. Taking it away, so that when it returned it was a hundred times more powerful.

She thought of the touch of Viktoria’s nose to hers, the pad of her thumb caressing Yuuri’s lip, her legs straddling Yuuri’s so easily like they folded into each other.

Yuuri rolled onto her side. She was _not_ doing this, not again. Taking down the posters, while highly disappointing, had been helpful in keeping Yuuri ascetic. At least when she took down the posters, that smile wasn’t there, gazing down at her so kindly, so keenly, so knowingly. Watching her. Unwavering.

Something else. Think about something else. What was objectively sexy? What was a story about sex?

A man and a woman. Safe start. That would calm her down. Victorian era. Scratch that, regency era. A playboy goes town to town, pursuing the most lovely, stalwart maidens. He finds one maiden who, though obviously attracted to him, continually rejects him. Why does she reject him?

Plot hole. It could be resolved later. She rolled over onto her back, thought about scandalous, bodice-ripping sex scenes. Earth tone rooms lit only by trembling candles, casting long, fluid shadows against the walls and ceiling, gentle, loving silhouettes in the window. Contrast, darkness and light. A warm touch on cold skin, the thumb on her lips…

Fuck it. Her door was locked. She had time. And she was quiet. She could manage. She reached a hand down.

Where had she left off? The maiden, in the face of unwavering evidence and wondering why she had ever been unsure of him in the first place, accepts the playboy, now under his tender spell. Contrast, darkness and light.

The playboy follows their affair through until he has truly gotten all that he wanted. He no longer has any use for the maiden, and so he abandons her, moving on to the next town, the next conquest, the next soul to disarm.

That wasn’t a sexy ending, but it was a start. Yuuri rubbed between her legs, trying not to open her eyes or let her mind wander away from the story. She needed Eros, she needed intrigue, provocation, tension, desire. Maybe someday the playboy would return.

“Fuck,” she muttered, rolling over onto her side. It still felt like sandpaper between her fingers, rough and unaroused. She needed another approach. More men. Three of them. That was hot, right? Go big or go home. Enough so that she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move, couldn’t _think_ , trapped in a cocoon of stimulation.

She reached a finger in, trying to draw out more wetness. It was working a little bit. Something else _had_ to work, to wring the tension out of her shoulders, hips, thighs.

_Something powerful smoldering just beneath the surface._

Fuck, fuck, _fuck_. Not again, not again. Think of someone else, some _thing_ else. Filling her, covering her, engulfing her—

_Can you show it to me, Yuuri?_

Could she? Couldn’t she? She rolled onto her back, her breathing accelerating, calves trembling, her thighs, Viktoria’s strong, thick thighs in those sweatpants—

_Can you do that?_

Yes, she could, yes, yes, yes _yes_ _yes_ —

_My Yuuri._

The thought of Viktoria’s thighs on either side of her head, Yuuri’s arms wrapped around her waist, Viktoria clinging to her hair and pounding on the headboard and calling out for _her_ Yuuri—it was enough to make Yuuri orgasm like a firecracker, muffling high whines into the back of her hand.

She hadn’t gotten any sleep. Not that she deserved it, she supposed, sitting up and cracking her back. There wasn’t a mess of course, nothing a quick bathroom trip couldn’t erase. When she checked the clock on her bedside table again, it was nearly time for her to go down for dinner.

Viktoria would expect an answer.

When Yuuri stepped out of her room she let out an unintentional scream. One of those horror movie screams, like she’d seen a spider, or maybe a dead body.

It was neither of those things. In fact, it was Yurio, standing between the door to Viktoria’s room and the door to the bathroom, creeping on her tiptoes. She screamed, too.

“Gah! What the fuck?”

Yuuri clung to the doorframe. “You scared me.”

“Obviously,” she groaned. Thank Christ she hadn’t heard Yuuri. “You’re such a pissant, Katsudon.”

“Is that what you’re calling me now?” asked Yuuri.

“If I don’t get my own name then neither do you.”

“Fair, I guess. But, uh, Yurio.” She looked around the hallway. “What are you doing here?”

A guilty shock went through Yurio, but she sighed and confessed, “I was trying to find Viktoria’s journal that she’s always carting around. See if she had any other routines lying around that I could blackmail her into letting me use.”

“Why?” asked Yuuri. “She choreographed _Agape_ specially for you.”

“No,” said Yurio in a grow, “she choreographed something for herself when she was fifteen, not for me. She was going on about, ‘getting in touch with a softer side of myself,’ and, ‘letting the feeling drive the routine,’ and nonsense like that.”

Sounded like good advice, in Yuuri’s opinion, though Viktoria should have realized that Yurio would resist her teaching no matter what if it didn’t appeal to her core desires. It was the same with Yuuri. But by that logic, unlocking her Eros would have to be good advice, and so far that hadn’t worked out very well, so this train of thought should be abandoned quickly. “You should talk to her about it,” Yuuri said.

“I did, I’m not stupid!” snapped Yurio. “She wouldn’t listen.”

“No, I mean _talk_ to her,” said Yuuri. “Sit her down away from the rink and tell her what’s bothering you. That’s probably the best way to be heard. She’s just too excited about this whole competition she’s come up with, it’ll wear off eventually. Or I can talk to her for you, if you want.”

Yurio scoffed. “I don’t get why you like her so much.”

“I’m sorry?”

“I know she’s cool and all, but she’s not _that_ cool. She’s just a great skater, that’s all. She drinks too much and acts all high and mighty and never helps people—well, almost never.” Their eye contact had long since broken. She sounded almost disappointed.

Without another word, she turned and started back down the corridor, shoulders caved inward, abandoning Yuuri in the deep brown hallway. The dark colors of her jacket made her seem small, like she faded into the shadows. Maybe that was the intent.

Viktoria left Yurio behind for Yuuri. The mere notion of Viktoria leaving had struck Yuuri like a knife in the gut. The reality must have been exponentially worse.

Why Yuuri?

She ate her diet-approved meal in a stupor while the other two ate their katsudon. Yurio looked equally strung-out, and Yuuri couldn’t tell if she should feel a camaraderie with Yurio or if she should try not to step on her toes. She didn’t know who Yurio harbored more animosity towards.

Yuuri trying not to be embarrassed in the presence of Viktoria, the simultaneous bane of her existence and feature of her fantasies. It was too complicated a relationship to allow them to be friends like Minako and Phichit wanted. Hopefully, if nothing else, they could soon truly be a professional coach and student, but Viktoria had shot that in the head this afternoon. They had to find a common ground as soon as possible, or else Viktoria would go back to Russia whether Yuuri won or lost.

Eros, that had to be their start. What else was there? Something suitable, something that tempted her, something that filled her with ecstasy, pleasure, something that impaired her judgement and ground time to a halt, something else that she desperately, carnally wanted, yet couldn’t have.

Then, it hit her. It wasn’t much, but it was a start. Definitely a different approach, if nothing else. She sat up straight, inspired, and slammed her hand down on the table, startling her coach and her rival equally. Deep breaths. Bite the bullet.

“Katsudon,” she told Viktoria, the guilt sitting heavy on her tongue. “ _That’s_ my Eros.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
> 
> thank you so much for reading!!!


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